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[Starver]

They got the wire transfer on the 18th, so yep - had to pay up front. Of course it's not Trump who had to pay so much as all the donors who keep pumping money into his campaign post-election...

Famously, one donor is suing for a return. Fred Eshelman donated this to the "True The Vote" fund apparently contesting four states, including this one, initially $2m and then drawn into a top-up $.5m (thus almost the full WI amount, if they were involved in piping the cash and not a completely separate 'battlefund', though I don't know how much proportion it'd be of four state-fees, where paid, plus 'internal costs'). But was refused meaningful "progress reports" that he says were promised, and turned down a $1m repayment settlement. (If he'd have accepted it, that would have been another million 'invisibly burned', maybe other top donors did re-withdraw large amounts, eating up other good-faith donations.)

It'll be interesting to know, when the dust is settled, and any books can be 'uncooked' if necessary, how Ponzi-like this whole thing was (beyond normal fully conscious black-holing of political funding, which seems to me to be already a trickle-up scheme of wealth accumulation by anyone even halfway seriously into US politics as well as many who never really think they should be - thusly Trump, c.2015 and before) and where it might have been funelled - if not just amorohously 'accumulated to abet other accumulation', given that even if you'd somehow tagged 'your' dollar donation, it could pop back out anywhere from buying a staffer a cookie in a Starbucks to part-paying federal taxes (scratch that, probably exempt) Trump's own, non-AF, personal pilots.

[Bumber]

My aunt had cancer and couldn't get enough care because of Covid. Fuck it, let's cut her off now no, fuck that, she's dead. She is dead and she is not coming back. She meant something to someone. This was preventable. Her quality of live could have been better as she she went.

What do you mean by "couldn't get enough care because of Covid"? Were the usual doctors/beds too busy treating COVID patients? Or was care restricted for fear of spreading COVID?

[Bumber]

Primarily the latter, as I recall- if she did catch COVID, she wouldn't survive, and any elective care was being postponed or canceled.

Okay, so... doesn't that mean she was basically killed by the attempts to lockdown and stop the spread of COVID rather than COVID itself?
(I figured upon asking the question that the answer was probably the latter. The expertise and equipment required to treat COVID versus cancer aren't readily interchangeable.)

It's in line with Shazbot's point about the "inordinate" fear of COVID versus all the other diseases and causes of death. He mentioned the 9.56 million deaths from cancer in 2017 (i.e., a time where we weren't discouraging people from seeking preventative care,) and how COVID deaths are a drop in the bucket compared to that. She would've been at extreme risk of COVID death if she caught it, but untreated cancer kills even the otherwise healthy. (Also in line with McTraveller's "check back in 10 years" to find out about COVID versus lockdowns.)

[Teneb]

Primarily the latter, as I recall- if she did catch COVID, she wouldn't survive, and any elective care was being postponed or canceled.

Okay, so... doesn't that mean she was basically killed by the attempts to lockdown and stop the spread of COVID rather than COVID itself?
(I figured upon asking the question that the answer was probably the latter. The expertise and equipment required to treat COVID versus cancer aren't readily interchangeable.)

It's in line with Shazbot's point about the "inordinate" fear of COVID versus all the other diseases and causes of death. He mentioned the 9.56 million deaths from cancer in 2017 (i.e., a time where we weren't discouraging people from seeking preventative care,) and how COVID deaths are a drop in the bucket compared to that. She would've been at extreme risk of COVID death if she caught it, but untreated cancer kills even the otherwise healthy. (Also in line with McTraveller's "check back in 10 years" to find out about COVID versus lockdowns.)

I imagine it was also a lack of beds, since COVID patients are taking all of those.

EDIT: At the end of the day though, if I had to choose between no lockdown, which will result in more people dying of the disease, and lockdown, which might prevent some of those deaths, then... I will choose the lockdown. Because refusing to pick an option that might be better because it also might not be is, to me, morally wrong.

[ChairmanPoo]

You have to be bloody stupid to think that cancer deaths will rise because of lockdowns, and yet it's a pithy phrase that I hear too damn often . Perhaps the people saying that are unaware that a hospital collapsed due to covid won't have beds to provide for cancer diagnosis and care? Or anything else, for that matter.

In fact you can almost generalize this: whenever someone says "I'm against lockdowns because they cause XYZ" the answer is almost always that they are wrong and lockdowns are amelliorating XYZ, which is driven by the pandemic.

[ChairmanPoo]

It´s not that different than with cancer: The economy doesn´t exactly work with a rampant deadly virus, either. Know what´s really harmful? Half-assed measures. As in, only partially close, have things go south, lock down tigher, then when things improve a bit then open up almost completely until you are riding a second wave, rinse and repeat.

In Asia they´re both controlling the virus and having an economy, because they locked down as much as they needed to while they invested what they needed to invest in track and trace. Which is the sensible approach.  Half-assed approaches like in most of Europe dont sort out the problem and deal heavy societal damage. "Let the dead bury the dead" approaches like some people suggest here are sheer lunacy.

[Random_Dragon]

=Know what´s really harmful? Half-assed measures.

This, exactly. We'd be in a lot better shape if the early response had been even halfway competent.

[Teneb]

I would like to point out that poor countries like Vietnam managed to control the disease by... you guessed it, locking down. They're having pretty normal lives by now from what I hear.

[Starver]

Just you wait, that meteor going to skim the atmosphere is actually jar jar's wedding procession coming down in proper 2020 style.

Not this one, with the wrong timing?

[McTraveller]

=Know what´s really harmful? Half-assed measures.

This, exactly. We'd be in a lot better shape if the early response had been even halfway competent.

I think the argument is it needed to be better than halfway?

I don't dispute that lockdowns work.

I think my ultimate conclusion is that track and trace, lockdowns, etc. work only if the population being locked down actually stays locked down. This can be willingly (I presume this was the general case in say Oceana) or by force.  The US and similar cultures suffer because the population itself isn't willing to stay locked down and is not subject to forceful lockdown.

What I can't come to a conclusion about is if using force to do a lockdown is more or less morally right than not having one and suffering the consequences of how a disease spreads.  I'm beginning to think that both forced lockdowns and not being careful and so promoting disease spread are morally wrong.  I'm not willing to say that one is "more" wrong than the other - they are both awful, even though disease-related deaths are definitely more visceral.  I understand that some people do think there is no question that forcing people to behave a certain way "when they clearly can't make a good decision" is acceptable and even mandatory... so we'll just have to disagree on that.

[Bumber]

Let's ask how many died in Japan, or New Zealand, or Australia. Let's tell Italy that their lockdown killed more people than it was worth. Let's tell all of our dead loved ones that they're dead because we wanted to go to a movie theatre. Or, keep going on, shrugging and admitting 'it was inevitable' to shirk any kind of personal or collective responsibility to curtail a global phenomenon.

They aren't entirely comparable to the US. For one, the US has shit healthcare to begin with. In all except Japan, the US had higher flu deaths per capita in 2018. No lockdowns involved. (Also, Italy's COVID deaths per capita are actually higher than the US.)

Secondly, the US has 5,000+ airports compared to the others, which have 29 (Japan), 62 (New Zealand), 77 (Italy), and 175 (Australia). This gives them a greater ability to restrict international travel on a wide scale.

Thirdly, American culture and law makes a strict lockdown a non-starter, so you get a half-assed worst of both worlds for disease and economic damage by default. (The UK and Spain suffered similarly, and both have higher COVID deaths per capita than even the US.)

Lastly, the total deaths as a result of lockdowns won't be known for years. The deaths for lack of early diagnoses for diseases will come into effect only when those diseases prove fatal. Same for deaths due to poverty.

IMO, the US should have stuck with "2 weeks to flatten the curve", and then repeated as necessary. Isolate the vulnerable.

Track and trace is more effective at the beginning of a pandemic, or when you otherwise have around 1% of the population infected. Unfortunately, we were plagued by faulty testing reagents at the outset. It's a lot less useful when you've got tons of asymptomatic spreaders everywhere.

[Nirur Torir]

Adults and persons aspiring to become adults only. You are warned.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The United States consists of some three-hundred and thirty million people.
Thus far, some 200,000 - 250,000 have died of either presumed or proven Covid-19 infections.
These persons are overwhelmingly past reproductive age, in retirement, in nursing homes, or already afflicted with frail health.

250,000 / 330,000,000 = 0.076%, rounding up.

Internationally there are some seven billion, eight hundred million people.
Thus far, some 1,500,000 have died.

1,500,000 / 7,800,000,000 = 0.0193%, rounding up.

Every year, seven billion, eight hundred million move one year closer to their life expectancy and the end of their terminal illness known as ordinary metabolism.

A full 100% are dying.

Some sixty million people finished dying this year. At 1.5 million deaths, 0.025% of these deaths were due to Covid-19.

For comparison, in 2017...
17.79 million deaths from cardiovascular disease.
9.56 million deaths from cancer.
3.91 million deaths from respiratory diseases.
2.56 million deaths from lower respiratory infections.
2.51 million deaths from dementia.
2.38 million deaths from digestive diseases.
1.78 million deaths from neonatal disorders.
1.57 million deaths from diarrheal diseases.
1.37 million deaths from diabetes.
1.32 million deaths from liver diseases.
1.24 million deaths from traffic accidents.

For comparison again, the Asian flu pandemic of 1957-1958 killed more than one million worldwide (0.034% of a world population of 2.87 billion, and a case mortality rate of 0.6%). Deaths in the United States were 110,000 (0.00062% of a population of 177 million). There was no shutdown.

I had Covid, my wife had Covid, my two older children had Covid, my 84 year old grandmother had Covid. My grandmother was barely affected and pulled through easily, but the only reason she and anyone else in the nursing home is alive, hugging their great grand-children, is being kept from them. This is a torture of kindness. The only person to have died of a respiratory disease in my most extended possible social circle was my children's Sunday school teacher, 26 and healthy, of ordinary influenza in early January.

The reason we need lockdowns all over the world is because people who are inordinately afraid of death think we need lockdowns all over the world, and their leadership sees this as a great opportunity to posture as protectors of their constituents against selfish political adversaries who want to get everyone else killed.

From my perspective this has been yellow journalism par excellence, in which "have a Zoom call Thanksgiving" will be remembered with as much head-shaking shame at our own gullible stupidity as "remember the Maine".

People die, and as much as materialists mock spiritualists who believe in eternal life for those who adhere to ritual and obeying the grey-haired man at the podium, they remain just as certain that if we all cloistered in our materialist bubbles and entrusted our bodies to the grey-haired man on television with a lab coat, this angel of death will pass over us.

It will. But it isn't hurried. The Asian flu, H2N2, was vaccinated against in 1958, mutated, and returned as H3N2, causing the 1968 Hong Kong flu pandemic. Asian flu killed one million. Hong Kong flu killed four million. Covid-19 may kill six million. Covid-30 may kill twenty-four million.

Those who finish dying a few years early are a hundredth of a percentile.

Sixty million people finished dying in 2019. Sixty million people will finish dying in 2020. Sixty million people will finish dying in 2021.

The fearful man dies a thousand times, the brave man dies only once. Stop being dead.

I don't care. You were warned.

What sort of statistics are these? You can't take the average death toll of a pandemic, including the time of its initial slow spread, judged against the entire world population, and extrapolate from that how deadly it is.

For more accurate data, use the most recent time from in a country that has failed to contain it. Let's call it the last month and a half in the USA.
Week 40 2020: 3,919 of 56,656 deaths in USA from COVID-19 (6.92%)
Week 41 2020: 4,433 of 57,997 deaths in USA from COVID-19 (7.64%)
Week 42 2020: 4,714 of 56,233 deaths in USA from COVID-19 (8.38%)
Week 43 2020: 5,336 of 56,674 deaths in USA from COVID-19 (9.42%)
Week 44 2020: 5,801 of 55,477 deaths in USA from COVID-19 (10.5%)
Week 45 2020: 6,175 of 53,367 deaths in USA from COVID-19 (11.6%)
Week 46 2020: 4,573 of 42,566 deaths in USA from COVID-19 (10.7%)
9.22% of total deaths across 7 weeks are from COVID-19.

Let's call that a baseline 9% chance of any given person dying early, or a 9% decrease in life expectancy for everyone, if we continue with current measures and the vaccines don't come out in the planned timeframe, because we can't rely on things to always work as planned. 9% of our lifespan gives us an expected utility of about 7 years locked down before it stops being worth it, depending on how much you value a year of lockdown vs dying a year earlier.

We have unknown factors that may increase this, including: How quickly people can be reinfected, how long it takes to mutate enough so that it can reinfect someone, whether a second infection is more mild or worsens the brain and lung damage it causes, and how much worse it will be as the numbers go up and hospitals get overloaded. We don't have enough ICU beds and ventilators for everybody.

Ah, but we have vaccines to save us from our addiction to coughing in each other's unprotected faces. They will save us. Please ignore that pharmaceutical companies like to charge $100 for an epipen when they'd be profitable at $40 per year per person. I'm sure they'll be reasonable and everyone will be able to afford the vaccines. If not, I'm sure our entirely reasonable GOP-locked senate will pass a budget to help the poor people who can't afford them.
After that, surely people will get them even if they need yearly boosters. And of course we don't have fearmongering about the Democrat plans to inject microchips into the vaccines to track people, or about vaccines causing autism.

We can't just hope everything will go perfectly when there are so many unknowns with a pandemic, and so many malign knowns.


Thus ends my years long plan to never post in this crazy thread.

[Random_Dragon]

I think the argument is it needed to be better than halfway?

Bad wording on my part, mixed metaphors you could say. The measures were halfway in the sense of half-assed, while I was referring to "not even halfway competent" in the sense of implying they were incompetent.

[thompson]

The US failure really comes down to poor leadership and the polarisation of the pandemic. But even without these factors it was probably doomed anyway. There are a whopping 50 semi-sovereign states there and it would have only taken one to drop the ball to bring the rest down. Europe’s failure is instructive here too. Individually I’d say many countries could have defeated COVID. But they kept the borders open so wound up infecting the whole continent to the point there is really no hope of elimination.

The half-assed point nails it. But it’s not just individual measures that were half-assed but the strategy was, so far as I can tell, non-existent. Ok, you lock down. Great. What next?

A multi-layered defence strategy was essential. Instead, the US/EU were all tactics, no strategy.

[ChairmanPoo]

Problem wasnt borders. They were closed for a long time. Problem was insisting in opening business, esp tourism and bars and restaurants (which in turn resulted in opening the borders).