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

[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

Trump has withdrawn the US from WHO:
https://twitter.com/SenatorMenendez/status/1280556507365597190?s=20

"Trump would withdraw the US from the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic" is the kind of thing that, if you had said it four years ago, would have gotten you dismissed as a partisan hack engaging in baseless scaremongering.

[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1281011207198171137

It'll be down to close to zero in no time. /s

[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

https://mobile.twitter.com/vijayshekhar/status/1281626446503399424

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't he say there would be a vaccine "very soon" back in, like, February?

[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

https://mobile.twitter.com/vijayshekhar/status/1281626446503399424

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't he say there would be a vaccine "very soon" back in, like, February?

It's like repeatedly predicting a solar eclipse will happen soon.  Eventually it will be correct if you keep it up long enough.

I mean solar eclipses can be predicted for basically all eternity with the exact date and time.

Not true.

Depends on exactly what we mean by "basically all eternity". There are already predictions going 1000 years into the future, but yeah on several million (maybe even billion) year timescales things break down due to the difficulties of n-body physics.

[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

Georgia reported 4,484 new coronavirus cases Friday, shattering the previous daily record by 1,012 more cases.

The previous mark for new cases in a day was set July 2, when 3,472 cases were reported by the state’s Department of Public Health.

https://www.ajc.com/news/georgia-shatters-record-for-daily-coronavirus-cases/eRjhAXk3J2syGztHaCppjP/

Yikes

[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

We've exceeded 70,000 new cases today alone, and it's still one hour until the day's reports end.

Hasn't it just been a few days since we passed 60,000? At this rate, we may hit 100,000 by the end of next week.

That's exponential growth for you.

[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

The average over the last seven days is over 55K.

Horrifying.

[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

California re-instituting bar, restaurant, movie theater, and other closures. Other states seeing spiking cases would be wise to follow suit swiftly.

https://twitter.com/GavinNewsom/status/1282752861835649024

[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

California re-instituting bar, restaurant, movie theater, and other closures. Other states seeing spiking cases would be wise to follow suit swiftly.

https://twitter.com/GavinNewsom/status/1282752861835649024

Ugh.  California locked down hard and early.  And cases kept rising all throughout the lockdown. Why keep repeating a strategy that has already proven to be a failure, without any real endgame in mind?  This is all reminiscent of the Vietnam War, or the Iraq War "surge".

The lockdown worked. We weren’t hit hard like other states such as NY, NJ, WA or LA. Then Newsom eased restrictions and cases recently started to spike because of it. Restrictions should have never been lifted.

The ban on indoor dining and bars especially. Those are unlikely to be safe until there's a vaccine, given that you can't exactly wear a mask while eating and drinking.

[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

California re-instituting bar, restaurant, movie theater, and other closures. Other states seeing spiking cases would be wise to follow suit swiftly.

https://twitter.com/GavinNewsom/status/1282752861835649024

Ugh.  California locked down hard and early.  And cases kept rising all throughout the lockdown. Why keep repeating a strategy that has already proven to be a failure, without any real endgame in mind?  This is all reminiscent of the Vietnam War, or the Iraq War "surge".

The lockdown worked. We weren’t hit hard like other states such as NY, NJ, WA or LA. Then Newsom eased restrictions and cases recently started to spike because of it. Restrictions should have never been lifted.

The ban on indoor dining and bars especially. Those are unlikely to be safe until there's a vaccine, given that you can't exactly wear a mask while eating and drinking.

So when the state locked down back in March you expected the lockdown to last for 12-18 months until there was a vaccine? (Or at least for all indoor restaurants to be closed for that long?)

It wasn't as obvious then as it is now that indoor dining is a huge part of this problem, so no, I didn't quite expect that back in March. And if we could have gotten a sufficient contact tracing and isolation regime put in place during the first lockdowns, maybe we could have avoided this. That's what countries that have all of this largely under control did! But when you have 60K new cases every day nationally and rising, it isn't realistic that we're going to get a sufficient contact tracing program set up any time soon. Maybe in four months indoor dining could be safe again if we somehow make massive improvements in contact tracing between now and then. As things exist, I'm expecting that we will once again fail to create such a contact tracing program, so yes, I think shutting down restaurants until there is a vaccine is probably going to end up as the least bad way to deal with all of this.

To be clear, we should be providing a massive rescue package to the restaurant industry to prevent an otherwise inevitable wave of bankruptcies, especially because the government failure on contact tracing has created this situation that they are now dealing with.

[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

My state and county are a good example of how things can get really bad again after everything was seemingly under control. We were the “model of the country” for months after initially being hard hit, and as soon as everyone decided to let their guard down, cases are spiking again, worse than they’ve been since March. Reopening really only works when a large majority take it seriously, and don’t let down their guard too quickly. Sadly, a lot of young people are just assuming that the virus is yesterday’s news (“COVID is sooooo last March!”) and that everything’s totally fine now. If we jump the gun on more, like opening schools too quickly, things are going to get much worse and fast.

Yeah, a real problem has been getting people to understand that this is going to be a phased process. It can't just be "stay at home order" and "back to normal" with nothing in between.

[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

California re-instituting bar, restaurant, movie theater, and other closures. Other states seeing spiking cases would be wise to follow suit swiftly.

https://twitter.com/GavinNewsom/status/1282752861835649024

Ugh.  California locked down hard and early.  And cases kept rising all throughout the lockdown. Why keep repeating a strategy that has already proven to be a failure, without any real endgame in mind?  This is all reminiscent of the Vietnam War, or the Iraq War "surge".

The lockdown worked. We weren’t hit hard like other states such as NY, NJ, WA or LA. Then Newsom eased restrictions and cases recently started to spike because of it. Restrictions should have never been lifted.

If cases keep rising under the lockdown, how do you know when to end or ease the lockdown?
A lockdown isn't working if you have to stay under lockdown indefinitely.

Cases keep rising because it’s impossible to cut human contact. People will ignore the lockdown. People will still go out to get groceries and other necessities. Some don’t wear masks when doing so. People are still coming in (and out) of the state. Saying “cases still went up!” as an argument for why lockdowns don’t work is pretty weak.

Yes, basically full on lockdowns accomplish nothing positive.

A lockdown is a drastic pause button meant to allow time for governments to come up with less damaging, sustainable measures for reducing transmission: contact tracing and isolation, etc. But until the government starts doing it's f***ing job and implementing those more sustainable measures, the choices are essentially either lockdown or uncontrolled exponential spread. Given the choice between the two of those, I think lockdows are the least bad option for the time being, especially in states that are seeing spiking cases.

All of our problems originate from the fact that the government essentially looked at the pandemic like this:

[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

A lockdown is a drastic pause button meant to allow time for governments to come up with less damaging, sustainable measures for reducing transmission: contact tracing and isolation, etc. But until the government starts doing it's f***ing job and implementing those more sustainable measures, the choices are essentially either lockdown or uncontrolled exponential spread. Given the choice between the two of those, I think lockdows are the least bad option for the time being, especially in states that are seeing spiking cases.

Why are these the only choices?  This is why so many people increasingly lack trust in public health officials; they aren't actually giving us the real alternatives. 

We could have solved this months with a much, much lower death toll ago if a lockdown of the vulnerable population had been accompanied by a program of controlled voluntary infection of the young and healthy.  But politicians and health officials were either in complete denial or just didn't have the courage to confront the true scope of the problem.

I literally just said we need better, more sustainable measures to control the pandemic. The problem is those take time develop and implement. You can't just contact trace 10000 new people every day in a single state when you don't have infrastructure in place to do that - and none of these states with rapidly spiking cases have that infrastructure. The thing about lockdowns is they are simple and can be implemented rapidly. I want nothing more than for the government to start functioning properly and come up with a better alternative to lockdowns as quickly as possible. But until they actually do that, a swift lockdown is better than the alternative of widespread exponential transmission.

[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

The numbers didn't explode as much as I expected yesterday, but we're still in the red relative to last week on all fronts.

Data can be quite noisy. The overall trend is still alarming.

[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

New York has set the example to everyone on how to handle the coronavirus properly:

Fauci holds up New York as model for fighting coronavirus — 'They did it correctly'

Kudos to Governor Andrew Cuomo!

Watch Del Tachi use this to smear Fauci as an evil partisan hack.
While Cuomo definitely didn’t do everything right, he is infinitely better than the Sunbelt Trio and Kemp the Killer.

Fauci probably could and would have praised Hogan or DeWine if he had wanted to give it the appearance of bipartisanship.... then again, it isn't his really job to always give credit to "both sides!" and there's definitely nothing praiseworthy about DeSantis or Kemp.

Why would you praise DeWine?  Cases in Ohio have more than tripled in the last month with no sign of slowing down.  They had a new record number of cases just yesterday.

North Carolina saw new record cases today.  Cases in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Illinois, and Minnesota have all approximately doubled over the last few weeks. 

If you are defining success by keeping cases low, it’s tough to say that anyone outside of New York and New Jersey have done a good job, and those states still have by far the highest death rates, which is probably a better metric anyway.

And this, of course, is what happens when you have as incompetent a federal response as we're seeing. There are barely any states that can be judged to actually be doing well, mostly just states that are doing less terribly.

[Darthpi – Anti-Florida Activist]

According to worldometers, it looks like today was the first day since June 9 (six weeks ago) where the US saw a week-over-week drop in daily cases.

Encouraging, but we really need to see an actual sustained decline, not the plateau that we had after the first peak. For the sake of the country let's hope that happens.