Not trusting the government is how you get Russia.
There's obviously a nuanced position to build a government that is trustworthy, but we've ignored that for the sake of greed, racism and other human vices.
Unfortunately the US government has always been a government for people who do not want to be governed, if you view it from that lens it's much easier to understand the idiosyncrasies of the system.
I don't think it's possible for the USA to move into a high civics-educated, high-trust society, those are cornerstones for a society to have a government made up of representatives of the population's interests, in turn earning respect.
The relationship between USA's population and its government is absolutely adversarial, making it very easy for financial elites to exploit the common people. Tack on top of that the power corporations have developed over the government since the 1980s and you get contemporary USA.
>Unfortunately the US government has always been a government for people who do not want to be governed
I don't think that's the entire description of the problem. The US government was setup to strictly govern a certain subset of the population (non-voting citizens, later non-voting people), but allow freedom to people who don't want to be governed.
The clash between the two has "generally" been helpful since it is a largely symbolic reality that we do both want structure and regulation but also freedom to do things outside that structure.
The current regime demonstrates that to a tee. That there is no clear intersection between who should be strictly governed and who should be imbued with freedom, and that there's no simple tests of them.
Exams performed by someone else? About once a year.
A self-exam once a month is one of those "good hygiene" things, though, and might be a decent idea to promote right now while people are getting cagey.
Considering how Google and Apple are basically mandating WFH for the rest of this year, these lockdowns aren't for them; they're for all the other people who need a way to take care of themselves without giving their bosses the finger.
3) We were wrong about the kinds of people who were going to catch this (e.g. poor folks, people of color, people in nursing homes, prisoners, people who work jobs they can't freely leave in meatpacking plants), who while they'll fill up a coffin just the same as anybody...
...are also all groups less likely to go to a hospital / ER even in GOOD times, and even when they do, tend to be treated like crap (e.g. assumed to be "drug-seeking", have their pain dismissed, often end up overlooked in triage, etc.)
This is the same old haves vs. have-nots story we've been telling, taken to a while new level -- if you're wealthy enough to be able to work from home, you've likely just been hunkering down and wondering what all the fuss is about.
It's not about fear-based leverage, it's about one group of people refusing to admit they're too insulated from the rest of society to see that the lower rungs that keep everything running are getting massacred.
When we talk about flu stats: most people have some immunity to the flu thanks to flu shots (even if they haven't gotten one for this past year) and general herd immunity, which we DO NOT HAVE for this virus, and won't gain without either a vaccine or a few million dead from this thing running rampant.
The stats you're quoting are WITH the level of serious intervention we've had so far, which is why as certain states are reopening, we're starting to see the numbers ticking back up again and looking just as bad if not worse.
I don't think he did compare it to the flu. But look, as unpopular as that comparison is, we just don't have numbers that support the original estimates that caused lock downs of 2 million dead in the US. The media pushed worst case over and over, and still is.
I think an uncomfortable stat this coming year will be just how few people will have been reported to died in 2020 of regular flu. It's not saying Covid19 isn't bad in any way to realize that number, will be almost nothing, and that will be suspicious to people going forward for NextTime.
We don't have those numbers because of the lockdowns, which were obeyed in part because of the media coverage. The alternative would have been China's approach of physically locking people inside their homes, or much lower compliance and higher infection and death rates.
There is the small matter that deniers make the claim that government lockdowns are forcing people to stay home, not work, etc. When the data tends to show people were starting to shelter in place well before governments took action.
Sweden didn't have an official lockdown, but they encouraged safer behavior and already have more work from home and single people living alone than other places. That would not have worked in the US, and in truth it didn't work as well as their neighbors.
They certainly have, but not due to a 'shutdown' like the ones that were being encouraged in every other country. The media stats said that we were in for 2m deaths in the United States if the government did not shut things down. That was wrong. A proper media response would have anticipated that -- even if the gov't didn't shut things down -- people would have been more cautious by making individual decisions. That would have lead to a better government response.
The inferred IFR from serological prevalance and deaths in NYC is ~1%. NYC's demographics skew favorably compared to the nation, but assuming ~60% of the country would get COVID-19 if not for restrictions, 2 million is right on the money.
And this also ignores those who survive COVID-19. Roughly 5% are being hospitalized with potential long term effects. Everyone assumes that we're over the hump. The only place in the US that I would consider over the hump is NYC. Everywhere else has nowhere to go until herd immunity is reached.
How do you square this with what happened in Lombardy, Spain, France and other places in which the healthcare systems were overwhelmed and tens of thousands of people died in just a few weeks?
Do you know how many flu deaths happened in Italy during the 2016/17 flu season?
Compare that to the Coronavirus deaths. The numbers are really close.
Italy isn’t particularly an outlier in terms of Coronavirus severity when you look at their historical flu numbers compared to the rest of Europe. Their Coronavirus deaths follow the same trend as with their flu fatalities. Really nothing surprising in Italy, but the media lost their minds over it.
Yes you are exactly right. It has always been normal to send the dead bodies to neighboring towns, when your crematoriums are full, and they did it every year in Lombardy. No one just noticed previously. I think we need to blame their mayor, for not encouraging building bigger better crematorium.
I asked you about the collapse of the healthcare system in Lombardy, within a few weeks of the virus appearing. When has the flu done that?
You're presenting what happened in Lombardy as some sort of mass hysteria. Was the healthcare system overwhelmed, or was that a mass hallucination?
There have been 30,000 confirmed CoVID-19 deaths in Italy, which is about double a normal flu season. What do you think that number would have been without any social distancing measures? As I see it, the numbers are not that difficult to estimate. About 70% of people would need to catch CoVID-19 before herd immunity brought R below 1. With an IFR of 0.5%, and a population of 60 million people, that would mean about 200,000 deaths. Is that enough to "lose one's mind over"?
* Not enough doctors, nurses, beds and medical supplies to treat all (or even most of) the patients.
* Extremely stark triage decisions. Deciding not to treat patients who would normally be treatable, instead leaving them to die.
* Doctors and nurses working to the limit of exhaustion.
* Normal care essentially stopping. All medical resources being focused on one disease.
* Morgues unable to handle the number of dead.
Finally, double the regular number of flu deaths occurred in just a few weeks, and that was with extreme social distancing measures. Without those measures, the death toll would have been far higher.
You're describing this as some sort of mass hallucination. I don't see how that's a defensible position.
> but I'm not sure you can say it 'collapsed' (what does that even mean anyway).
If there was any doubt that you're being disingenuous and purposely deceitful, the fact that you've decided to resort to petty arguments on semantics to desperately avoid facing the facts is enough to clear up that doubt.
