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

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

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. 

Nah.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

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.

The implication in the post is that lockdowns were a bad idea because of the response to the protests, which is a non-sequitur.

We're going to see a lot of this argument trying to vindicate opposition to lockdowns by arguing that the people imposing them were hypocrites. The latter being true doesn't make the former true at all. It's an ad hominem argument in its purest form.

In general, pointing out hypocrisies is one of the lowest forms of critical thought. When a person speaks out of both sides of their mouth, odds are, one of those sides is right. The wave of people we will see in the future who try to argue against lockdowns in this vein should be considered intellectual scoundrels.

With that said, I absolutely agree with the charge that many people have forfeited their authority on this issue by trying to take both sides here. It's one of the aspects of this very ugly and complicated scene that I find most horrifying; not because I am interested in ideology, but because when we face surges as a consequence of this (and/or in the Fall) it will be much, much more difficult to convince people to comply with the policy which leads to the most safe outcome.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

https://twitter.com/ddiamond/status/1269019027805999106

You all laughed at Del Tachi saying that scientists could have personal or political motivations.

Even if they do it doesn't mean the lockdowns they advocated for two months ago were bad. This is an ad hominem argument and it's intellectually lazy.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

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.

Sorry but that's an incredibly embarrassing reason to stop supporting restrictions.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

I understand it's a difficult decision but at health experts need to be transparent and accurate about transmission risks from the protests.

I have seen one scientist try to do this so far, but it's pretty obviously he was low-balling numbers and missing considerations like tertiary infections. Otherwise there are blanket statements about how police brutality is bad (which is obviously correct but is an incomplete assessment of the situation).

You can make the case that the protests are worth the public health risks, but you need to be honest with people about what those risks are. That's your job and your literal expertise. Most of these people haven't even tried to do that because they know they will be cowed into silence if they try to do so.

All I want is for someone to give me an accurate number of people who will get sick and die from these protests, and then make the case that the protests are worth that much at least.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

We had a few extreme wingnuts in the GOP and most other Americans atleast partially complying.
Now we have a large group of disaffected people feeling shunned by the elite woke mob who tells them nothing is worth besides their own issues.

It's much more likely that less time in news coverage (cable news, local news, and newspapers) means the virus is much less salient in people's minds than it is that there's some sort of backlash against woke elites.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

I gotta hand it to New York, New Jersey, Montana, North Dakota, Colorado, Massachusetts, D.C., Michigan, Pennsylvania, and perhaps a few others for somehow bringing the case count so low.

So why are California and Arizona so bad now?

Seems like reopening is going worse in those states where people spend most of their time in air conditioned spaces.

Anybody with a brain could have seen this coming based on our understanding of transmission.

We had a lot of brain-dead posts in this thread about how the virus would disappear in summer without understanding why summer is bad for the virus. It's not because the virus has some sort of calendar. It's because transmission happens more indoors with air conditioning systems, and people will spend more time outside during the summer. What happens in late spring? Weather gets nice and people go outside. What happens in the Sun Belt states in mid-summer? It gets hot so people go back inside. The result was predictable, and we'll see these further north once we get to July/August and places experience temperature regularly above 80.

The "summer makes the virus go away" discourse was bad because it meant people convinced themselves that they didn't need masks. You might not need masks outside but you obviously need them inside. The whole point of indoor climate control is to separate the climate indoors from the climate outdoors... the insides of buildings are designed to make transmission easier during the summer.

It's just damning that apparently nobody anticipated this when they were talking about reopening. I predicted exactly this in one of these threads about a month ago (too lazy to dig up the post), and I am just a random internet guy.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Why do all these stories keep using new cases as their central metric?  If you are trying to argue that the virus is an escalating problem, demonstrate it through stats on hospitalizations or deaths.

They keep using new cases but not the percent positive rate, which is way, way down from April.

You can't directly compare the positive rates from today with two months ago because tests aren't administered at random. Tests were being rationed two/three months ago to people and communities which were more likely to have positive cases; in part many of the people who are being tested now are people who had no reason to believe they were sick during the first wave (e.g., office workers who were working from home for two months and require tests to come back to work).

Even still, several states are reporting increases in positives cases that outstrip the increased testing. Several states are reporting more positive cases now than they were two weeks ago, when the number of tests wasn't that much different than today.

It's completely contrary to science to use the wrong metric for a pandemic, yet it continues.

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

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Either state governments are getting more blatant about hiding deaths or new infections are concentrated among much lower-risk populations than they were in March.

Why are you a Republican now?!

Because Phil Scott isn't bad and Democrats, especially those under 40, have stopped pretending to care about what I value most. I intend to address the change in greater detail at some point. Lockdown resentment was my catalyst.

I will be eagerly awaiting this post or draft versions of it.

(I am not being flippant or sarcastic)

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Has the EU restricted international travel at all? If so that's a pretty compelling reason why EU would have a lower case load than the US (and that's ignoring any differences in testing).

edited: initially wrote higher case load when I meant lower case load

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

also u guys do realize that if they do quarantine again, a lot more people are going to die of suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism or what have u then will probably be killed by the virus.

do u have actual numbers n stats for that brah?

In Colorado suicides were down in March and April.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Have Republcians or conservatives in general been right about a single thing related to Covid-19, since all this started?

Larry Hogan and Mike DeWine, maybe.

But other than that...

Mountain west governors (Gordon, Herbert, Little) have done fine. Managing an outbreak in Idaho is easier than managing one in New York, but still, these states have had pretty manageable cases considering (aside from Utah) they have below-median health care systems for the US.

The exception is reservations have had larger outbreaks but that's a result of a century of policy, not specific failures of these governors.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Remember when people such as Del Tachi and Dead0 were trying to convince Arlas that death rates wouldn’t go back up despite the surge in cases?

Gloating is ungentlemanly.