I will start reviewing those reports for work now, but we're looking at 100k cases per day, and those states are the most at risk of being overwhelmed, with the least political will to support unfortunately. It makes sense they work out sort of intra-state aid agreements, just kind of sad they have to. For context, it took from February to October to get to 9 million cases. If current trends continue, it'll take from now until roughly January to get to the next 9 million, with somewhere between 230,000-300,000 dead. That range is like the city of Buffalo or the city of Pittsburgh dying in a little over 3 months. The issue is going to be fatigue.
Globally, there doesn’t seem to be real solution. Europe’s cases-per-million are going to exceed the US; Germany and France are already there (or at least we’re a few days ago). Sweden, which had the “wrong” strategy, seems to be doing better but at an enormous social/economic sacrifice. Who knows?
I'm not from the region so it was surprising to me too. There is a big cultural divide between east and west Oregon. East Oregon is sparsely populated and rural and resents the hell out of the western part of the state that dictates ''oppressive '' laws over them. Pretty much everyonehere passionately hates Kate Brown . East Oregon has a history of being home to various militias and religious cults. East Oregon conservative have a different flavor that the Southern type conservative I am used to but it is still strong and unapologetic. At first meet people are like..... midwestern neighbor friendly, but the longer you talk the more it comes out.
France and Germany are locking back down but are keeping schools open. That makes zero sense. Schools are super spreaders.
New Zealand is also the perfect storm of being an island that doesn't have to let people in, from that perspective I'd be shocked if they were struggling with it. The rest of the world is though, I guess that means Trump is running the worlds response right?
An island nation that is 103k sq miles, vs the US 3.8 million sq miles, with a population of 4.9 million vs 328 million, and according to their immigration department Is the US border currently closed? Because I think it's limited immigration right now instead of the regular 2000 per day, but people are still coming and going from Canada and Mexico. I don't think you can compare NZ to the US, simply in terms of feasibility.
It's a hard comparison, but places like Puerto Rico, Alaska, Hawaii and New York should be able to figure out how to stop the spread, and they haven't. Also, I do not accept this "oh, it's hard". Fuck you. People are dying. Do something, or step aside so someone else can.
If Trump had come out at the beginning of this wearing a mask and telling his supporters "Every day you wear a mask is a day that Obama/Hillary/Whatever will spend in prison", I'm pretty sure those people would have glued masks to their faces and we'd be having significantly less problems.
I agree. For sure it's harder to fix in a larger country, but overall I think this is more a matter of political will. Make the hard choices, and make them early. Don't politicize science. Dismiss and ignore the deniers and make enforcement non-optional.
I mean, that's really it right there. If we can't, as a country, dismiss climate change and evolution deniers outright, then of course we're not going to be able to do it for a novel virus whose science is emerging day-by-day.
It'll be interesting if any of us get to the point where we vote in the people that will do what should be done, regardless of how painful it is, rather than do what will get them elected next round.
Speaking of hard/painful choices, the world is overpopulated so knocking 2-5% out would be good in a bunch of different ways. I don't know what the current death rate is, and I'm just playing devil's advocate here. It seems that the elderly are most likely to pass away saving SS here in the US and tonnes (<-- did I do that right?) of healthcare dollars in other countries. It also knocks out the older legacy workers who might be a touch less efficient in the workforce, though that experience is hard to replace. Things get cheaper, more jobs are available, more money is earned and the planet gets a break from pollution. I'm not making the case that doing nothing is the right call, but one could especially in light of the economic disaster that comes from shutdowns and businesses that cannot reopen. It's worth thinking about, and I think an interesting mental exercise, both extremes are costly for different reasons. The fact that the entire world is dealing with basically the same thing, outside of an island nation with totally closed borders, means that either we're missing something outside of the idiots that won't wear a mask I think (I could be wrong, maybe that's all it is) but at this point I've just accepted I'm probably going to get it despite wearing a mask and trying to stay away from others as much as possible.
I had this discussion last night: the population growth isn't the issue. We could all fit nicely into Oklahoma if we had to (albeit with a population density of Tokyo). That is a distortionary argument that basically implies "for us to have a positive relationship with the environment, lots of us have to die.", and no one is going to support that....it's also patently untrue. Sure, if a few billion of us weren't here, our CURRENT system would get an extension, but that's a ridiculous price to pay to keep the status quo. What is actually called for are "virtuous cycles" where economic and population growth result in positive impacts on our environment. We don't pursue them, largely because they are decentralized and not industrial scale. The 5th industrial revolution will focus on those sorts of de-centralized and virtuous systems interacting with one another. One of my favorite examples of this is a small fish pond feeding a local farm and greenhouse, powered by wind and solar. We could have 9 or 10 billion folks eating off of those kinds of systems, no problem. 9 or 10 billion people driving cars, eating KFC out of plastic wrappers that last for hundreds of years, etc. has a short span of viability. I say this because the next economic driver for us is going to have to be environmental for a bunch of reasons. Also, because we're probably 20 or 30 years away from "curing" aging, or dramatically altering it, so the notion of a 100-year lifespan where you can be productive and happy is not science fiction. And if you live to be 100 or more, it changes your perspective on longevity and the immediacy of what you are wiling to sacrifice. Remember kids, most of your older hippies haven't been wrong, they've been early. Long way of saying: how different would things look if we had a hundred year plan for our development as a nation?
We don't have to start up an eco-genocide, we just need to drive birth rates down for a while and then stabilize them at a nice number (1 billion humans seems comfy). The issue isn't pure space, it's whatever the lowest limiting factor is. That's obviously a complicated question, but the planet can comfortably support a far lower number of humans than it can physically fit. Maybe it's fish populations or the stability of the ocean ecosystem generally, maybe it's the atmosphere's ability to absorb CO2, maybe it's the rate at which fresh water sources are renewed, maybe its the carrying capacity of some kind of pollution, but the cap is somewhere. Risking running head first into that cap just so we can keep having exponential growth gains us... what exactly? Is a 20 billion human civilization more satisfactory than a 1 billion human civilization for anyone? Imagine being able to actually afford waterfront property, or visit Yosemite whenever you want. Space is nice.
The issue is that this isn’t binary, death or no death, with just a skew towards the elderly. We know that a large number of people are going to get organ damage from this disease, some permanent. We don’t know enough about the long term ramifications of the illness to responsibly be able to brush it off and say just let it run it’s course.
You answered yourself, we don't know. We don't know that a large number of people are having organ damage or that those that are experiencing this damage will find it permanent. It's a small number, I think, that will have damage, not that it's insignificant or we shouldn't be concerned about it but do we know that they didn't already have a bit of damage, or if they have a gene that makes them more susceptible to that damage. I fully agree the unknowns are scary ish and again I wasn't cheerleading that approach, the death we've already seen all over the world is terrible. I don't have answers sadly, I'm just as full of questions as anyone and I would guess once we have answers there will be a ton of things we'll find out we did wrong. The good news is that there are a ton of really smart people in the world and we're pretty much all in this together.
Agreed 100%. There also needs to be a better global spokesperson for climate change than a retarded Belgian child.