I posted a summary in the politics thread. The tl;dr is: lower turnout helps Republicans who are trying to hold onto a seat on the State Supreme Court.
Ok I've heard it all. A relative, thank god they're not blood, told me a bit ago they "don't think this is real." I very loudly asked the great outdoors "what the fuck? Why on earth would you say that?" She doubled down and said, "well, I mean I think it's real in the sense that there is a virus named COVID-19, but all the deaths and stuff? I think the media is just making that up. No one is gonna be dropping down dead now really? I don't know anyone who has died." I reminded her that the death toll in the US alone has already surpassed 9/11, and she asked me if I actually believed those numbers. I said I don't believe them, because they're not accounting for everyone who has died of COVID that they haven't tested, or haven't found yet, and that the results they're getting now have been delayed and aren't in real time, so yeah the numbers aren't accurate. The deaths are actually a lot higher. "Well I'll believe it when I see it. I don't know anyone who's gonna die from this." Said the 75 year old lady who doesn't want to take vaccines and calls herself a sovereign citizen. Only saving grace is that she's a felon so she can't vote. Unfortunately she still can move around and spread her stupidity via being contagious and not washing her damn hands. This is what we're up against by the way. There are actually people out there this stupid.
1) they take their sweet time once you apply. I mean, they move as slow as humanly possible. It’s amazing they only took a year to respond. 2) they don’t give a fuck about you, or how much they are inconveniencing you. They’re probably making you drive 12 hours of your way because they can’t bother to take ten seconds to schedule you in Sarnia. They will let you cross the border for this “meeting” where while inside, your car will be frisked by dogs and nosy, , heartless, pretentious assholes. So, clean your car and have nothing in it. 3) if, for some reason you are NOT allowed in, they will simply make you turn around and drive back to Canada. After banning you from their country permanently. They will also probably take a very condescending approach to you while there (since I’ve never seen anything but that from them), so be prepared to be treated like a stupid child while having to stand there and take it.
Here are the current mobility-recreation/business reduction rates (source: MacLeans) for Canada and the USA. It’s seems most of the southern states and Nova Scotia need to step their fucking game up:
You aren't understanding the principals involved here. A few things: First, flattening the curve is primarily about ensuring you have medical resources that can handle the influx of patients. If you just spike the infection everywhere at once, hospitals are overwhelmed, medical supplies can't keep up, and people die simply because they were unable to obtain effective care in a timely manner. So flattening the curve has a specific benefit that is not only about reducing the total number of infections - but see the next point on this. When you survive a virus, your body develops an immune response to it. That has a result similar to vaccinations in terms of creating a herd immunity - now the people who are infectious come into contact with some people who are immune, and those people with immunity are a buffer to other people. You no longer get straight exponential growth because the chain of contagion gets broken in a lot of places. Compounding on the two above: the more people we can treat successfully, the more immunity you have in the community and the less growth you have in infections. So again, keeping the total number of infections on a given day to a manageable number means more successful outcomes, which means more herd immunity. Lastly, people are working on treatments and vaccinations. Much of this is buying time to get there.
There seems to be a huge turn in the narrative this week, as we were told over the weekend, "the worst is yet to come", "Pearl Harbor", etc. and now suddenly the story is, "Hey this may not be so bad", "We may be seeing a turn", "this may be working". Not coincidentally, there's renewed talk of opening up the economy, getting people back to work, etc. Yet I still see things being canceled or put on hold months from now. There's a lot of mixed signals being put out there, and my gut is telling me that the concern is more "making America great" as elections draw closer and less on the reality that this thing could still be gaining traction.
Meanwhile, I don't know what you guys are seeing in your areas but here people are posting online, shaming people gathering in parks, not wearing masks and gloves, etc. and threatening to call the police on neighbors.
On a related note, there have been instances where folks have gotten reinfected after recovering. Why they got sick again isn't something I've heard yet. My guess is that there was another strain or they had compromised immune systems, but obviously we can't be sure yet.
Oh yeah, I got my first dirty looks yesterday while I was out shopping. The mask I had on really accentuated my eyes I guess.
There's also the damned if you do, damned if you don't aspect of this as well. If everyone follows the rules and abides by the new norms of staying put and the overall death rate is reduced because of it, people get labeled as alarmist because not that many people died. Completely disregarding the fact that the death rate was reduced because of those measures. So you can either die, or if you live, you're a hysterical alarmist.
So... time for people to know the frightening camouflage this virus has: I just found out my wife’s best friend’s husband has COVID. He also has sleep apnea, so he already has an ideal at home to quarantine with, and he’s getting through to my knowledge. They (people investigating its trace) think the way he caught it was from his son, who has not tested positive for it. He brought it home from an exposed person (a basketball teammate) and infected his father without it actually infecting him. We haven’t seen them in more than two months so we have no contact worry with them, but lots of scary stuff. They live in the town of St. Thomas, about twenty miles south of here. St. Thomas is a town of 35,000 people, it’s only hospital has ten ventilators, eight of them currently used. This virus attacks people anywhere, anyhow, however it chooses. Now under forced quarantine, health officials stop by their house twice a day to make sure he hasn’t left, and cops do drive-by checks constantly. Even in small town Ontario they are NOT fucking around.
Again, we have 400k infected and we've only tested 1.8 million. That's not people, that's individual tests (some individuals are tested more than once). From the death toll perspective, things are getting worse. From the rate of spread, we think it's getting worse but frankly we don't know because we don't have great testing. If you told me the actual cases were 500k I would highly doubt it's that low. It's plausible that actual cases are 800k-1m. Roughly, cases are increasing at 30k and deaths at 1200 per day. The deaths are more "confident", but from what I understand it's a bottleneck: there are certainly people dying from this that aren't tested and it goes uncounted. If we were following true pandemic response protocol, we'd be testing literally millions more people. The blindness the lack of testing causes is incredibly frustrating, because without it we simply don't know how we're doing or when this will end. The folks saying "Oh, this is getting better" seem to all be up for re-election. I think we're simply coming up against the reality that we can't continue these mitigation activities too much further into the future at a couple of levels.
It's been known for a while now that a meaningful number of infected people are asymptomatic carriers. At one point I saw numbers of ~15% but I don't know how accurate those are.
Apparently many places haven’t been counting at-home deaths. New York City are now saying that they’re numbers are at least 100-200 EXTRA DEATHS PER DAY that weren’t being tallied because they were going by hospital/health care facility deaths. That’s just New York City, not state. So, for the billionth time, this is way scarier and deadlier than they’re telling us.
I didn’t think you were at all. I was just piling on the new bad news I just discovered. It was coming from DeBlasio, saying that NYC is in dire straights and now perhaps over 500 a day could be dying there.