Quote (IceMage @ 12 May 2020 02:42)
To be honest I'm a little perplexed at what's happening. I hear from many that testing and contact tracing has to be utilized to re-open, yet it seems that it hasn't ramped up anywhere close to where it needs to be. Why is that? I don't want to just kneejerk blame Trump. Maybe there's a legitimate reason. But his messaging so far has been "lol we don't need all that testing, it just makes the US number grow higher", so I'm not sure what to believe.
It's the exact same situation here in Germany, and actually all of Europe as far as I can tell.
My guess is that the governments just didnt get it done until now, and underestimated the economic damage of the shutdown, so that the pressure to reopen became too big too soon.
Quote (EndlessSky @ 12 May 2020 03:08)
It was a scam from the start. The Dem's gain too much if they keep us closed longer.
They change the culture to a dependent culture of cowardice. They push people into unemployed dependence. And they crash Trump's economy.
Why would the rest of the world participate in this? The entire world is shouldering staggering amounts of debt and wealth destruction to fight this virus off. For example, why would the Hindu nationalist government of India, which has a good relationship with Trump and is ideologically well-aligned with him, make such huge sacrifices just to crash his economy and ruin his reelection? Dito for the governments in Australia and the UK, which also have an affinity for right-wing populism?
Quote (ofthevoid @ 12 May 2020 02:17)
March: "We have to close down the country otherwise millions are going to die. Hospitals will be overwhelmed and we have to flatten the curve."
April: "We see that the virus peaked and deaths, hospitalizations, spread has gone down. We know at this point hospitals won't be overwhelmed but to be safe we should remain closed for a little longer"
May: "Even though virus peaked weeks ago and we know for a fact we've flattened the curve, we should stay closed. If we open more people will die"
June: "If we open more people will die"
July: "If we open more people will die"
August: ""
Like at what point do we make the decision that it's time to aim for herd immunity instead of sitting scared? Yes people will die, but people will die if we open up now or if open 2 months from now and the spread ticks up again. The whole point of the shutdown was to flatten the curve so hospitals can manage, why are people moving the needle? Do people not understand that herd immunity needs to happen slowly?
Quote (ofthevoid @ 12 May 2020 03:10)
Herd immunity will happen at a much slower rate than it needs to if everything continues to be shutdown. The whole point was to make it manageable for the hospitals not indefinitely delaying it because we’re scared. Avoiding it doesn’t actually solve the issue, what solves this is most people getting antibodies.
My theory is the following: our governments got caught with their pants down, and when they finally realized that they really needed to shut down to buy time, they needed a good narrative to sell such drastic restrictions of constitutional rights and civic liberties, so they came up with the flatten the curve slogan. During the weeks following the start of the shutdown period, they realized that reaching herd immunity with a flattened curve would take too long and not nearly be done by the time a vaccine can be expected. Therefore, they silently switched the strategy from one of containment/mitigation to one of suppression coupled with tracing back and quarantining the chains of infection.
Indirectly, there will also be the hope that a treatment is found which either reduces the average hospitalization time or increases the survival rates of hospitalized patients. With such a treatment, a much higher infection level could be sustainable and allow us to bring public life and the economy back to almost normal. (Mass events like live sports, concerts or clubbing will probably remain off the table until a vaccine is found though.)
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on May 11 2020 09:25pm