1) show up to work at, say, McDonalds even if they're not feeling great.
2) wait until the last minute to seek health care because it's expensive
And by "curious" I mean "extremely worried".
Edit: I'm certainly no expert though; it'd be nice to consider some actual data about how these things spread (is the flu a similar enough model?). Maybe the above points don't really matter that much. I'm still worried in any event. Several relatives-in-law live in one of the affected areas of Italy.
We have a system where people are too terrified of their insurers to get tested or get medical care, and too terrified of their employers to stay home from work. It's a recipe for disaster in a pandemic.
Incidentally, the fact that authoritarianism and extreme predatory capitalism cause the same kind of fear that impedes things like public health might also suggest that maybe authoritarianism and extreme predatory capitalism are pretty similar, as folks like Elizabeth Anderson[2] and I[3] have argued...
[1] https://amp.miamiherald.com/news/health-care/article24047680...
[2] https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691176512/pr...
[3] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08913811.2014.9... (paywalled sorry)
The US generally has extremely strict guidelines regarding food safety and hygiene. In terms of food safety, America ranks above all but the Nordic countries.[1]
I can assure you that American restaurants absolutely will not tolerate a food worker with an active upper respiratory infection. If anything US restaurants are more likely to order a worker to stay home, because unlike Europe they generally don't have to give hourly workers paid sick time.
The obvious "dude is coughing / sneezing" case simply doesn't apply to Coronavirus. It can spread long before you show any symptoms.
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There are even cases where people are passing the virus on without ever actually getting, or feeling, sick. https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-confirmed-patients-...
Coronavirus is deadly enough to kill some people, but weak enough that some people's immune system represses it entirely.
In some ways, something like Ebola is easier to control. Because everyone who gets sick with Ebola actually shows symptoms (because Ebola is so deadly).
And of course people may be contagious before exhibiting a lot of symptoms, but that's certainly not US specific.
I think you're speaking with too much certainty here. It really depends on the restaurant's management, just based on my personal experience. Some will just assign people to jobs that aren't customer-facing because they can't afford to be short-handed and it's difficult to get people to come in on their day off.
"they generally don't have to give hourly workers paid sick time."
..is exactly why you should expect them to take something for their fever, turn up for their shift and say absolutely nothing to anyone about feeling unwell.
"But not all state and local food codes include FDA’s sick worker rules. In fact, 19 states have not adopted these rules. And some food workers work while sick even when their states or localities do have those rules. Indeed, 20% of food workers say they worked at least one shift with vomiting or diarrhea in the past year."
https://blogs.cdc.gov/yourhealthyourenvironment/2016/12/05/f...
See, he‘s getting experts involved, already:
https://mobile.twitter.com/HomelandKen/status/12320273067320...
~44 million people have no health insurance in the US, and another 38 million have inadequate health insurance. how many of them will skip the doctor and show up for work because they rather not face a surprise bill?
I got no doubt at this stage that the US will be hit the hardest from all the developed countries. No amount of testing and prevention mechanism the CDC can come up with, effective mitigation will depend on people seeking treatment and be willing to go to a doctor even without symptoms.
I'm pretty convinced that the only reason the US hasn't been hit as hard yet is that they aren't testing on the same scale.
In other news on twitter people from Vietnam, Thailand are currently boasting that the number of /their/ infected is tiny compared to South Korea - SK just tests on a massive scale. Not testing and educating people keeps your numbers low but you'll lose in the long run.
Hypocritical? Sounds like a completely orthogonal problem to me. You can have insanely unaffordable healthcare in authoritarian states and liberal democracies. If anything, the US is an outlier considering that healthcare works well in every other liberal democracy.
It's the biggest and most diverse so that's wouldn't be surprising, yes.
Whenever I read "homogeneous nation" I take a glance at my racism-o-meter...
I have no idea how reliable these polls are, or how much things have changed since they were conducted, but I've heard the statistic before and I at least got the impression that it wasn't considered a controversial one.
From what I understand, there are similar statistics about various other policies that could be considered 'socialist' (but are more European-style social-democratic). While many Americans are strongly opposed to anything with the label socialism, they seem to often actually be in favor of the actual policy that these 'progressives' propose.
I haven't taken any kind of deep dive into this though, so for all I know this is more controversial than I assumed.
This reminds me of the 2016 election. All the poll results said that Hillary would easily win the election. So much for those polls.
In fact, I'd say it's rather unsurprising that, whatever people might actually want, they would vote against their interest because 1) socialism is evil, and 2) "my team should win, no matter the policy".
Furthermore, there's a difference between a poll that predicts an election winner, which is notoriously difficult to do, and a poll that simply asks people whether they want <thing x>.
It's possible the wording of the questions is manipulative, or that they happened to poll an unrepresentative sample of the population. I don't know at this point.
But the fact that 1) the results of an 'issue' poll don't align with voter behavior and 2) that the results of an election winner poll doesn't in itself make a good case that the poll must be flawed.
If people are honestly this stupid, then why even bother polling them to see what policies they want? This is a serious question: if people don't bother voting based on policies they want, then why is that even important? If this theory of yours is true, then it really seems to call the voting population's basic intelligence into question, not to mention the fundamental idea of democracy itself. If the people are too utterly stupid to vote for their own best interests at least most of the time, then why wouldn't authoritarianism be a better system?
Honestly, I find it easier to believe that the polls are bad. I've seen way too many polls in my lifetime where the questions were manipulative, or just plain poorly worded or chosen. On top of that, the other problem with polls is that they only capture results from people who actually bother to respond to the polls, or are in a place where the pollsters are. Usually, when the latter is brought up, we're supposed to somehow believe that the pollsters have some great methodology that lets them determine what a larger population wants just by sampling a much smaller number of people in that population, but this is completely subject to bias and error. And finally, I point again to the 2016 election: predicting a winner is not as hard as asking if they want <thing x>. In this case, the poll is asking exactly the same thing as the election itself will: who do you plan to vote for? Asking about <thing x> is not as easy, because you can get wildly different results by asking the question differently. Do I want "Medicare for All"? Well, the answer might depend on many things, like how exactly it would be implemented. Is private insurance still allowed to exist as a supplement or alternative? Are non-citizens/"illegal aliens"/"migrants" (pick your term) covered? etc. You would probably get very different answers depending on those points in a large poll in America, so if you just ask a simple "do you want it? yes/no" question, that might not align at all with what actual candidates are proposing. Asking "who do you plan to vote for?" avoids that. And in the 2016 election, the polls were nowhere even close to the election results. That tells me the polls were either garbage, or rigged to try to influence the election.
All kinds of things play a role in this 'stupidity': tribalism, decades of anti-socialist propaganda, legitimate concerns based on history, and disengagement. It's completely understandable that one could reject 'socialism' and yet support most of what actual socialist argue in favor of.
> Honestly, I find it easier to believe that the polls are bad. I've seen way too many polls in my lifetime where the questions were manipulative, or just plain poorly worded or chosen.
If you're honestly engaging with me on this, and I'm hoping you are, I'd challenge both of us to do some research and further discuss this. I'm inclined to believe that in this case, with concrete policy questions, the questions and answers are not too manipulative, but of course I don't "know" this. Let's look into it.
> On top of that, the other problem with polls is that they only capture results from people who actually bother to respond to the polls, or are in a place where the pollsters are. Usually, when the latter is brought up, we're supposed to somehow believe that the pollsters have some great methodology that lets them determine what a larger population wants just by sampling a much smaller number of people in that population, but this is completely subject to bias and error.
True, but afaik this generally skews in favor of older, more conservative respondents and, crucially, more socalism-phobic, so to speak.
> And finally, I point again to the 2016 election: predicting a winner is not as hard as asking if they want <thing x>. In this case, the poll is asking exactly the same thing as the election itself will: who do you plan to vote for? Asking about <thing x> is not as easy, because you can get wildly different results by asking the question differently. Do I want "Medicare for All"? Well, the answer might depend on many things, like how exactly it would be implemented. Is private insurance still allowed to exist as a supplement or alternative? Are non-citizens/"illegal aliens"/"migrants" (pick your term) covered? etc. You would probably get very different answers depending on those points in a large poll in America, so if you just ask a simple "do you want it? yes/no" question, that might not align at all with what actual candidates are proposing. Asking "who do you plan to vote for?" avoids that. And in the 2016 election, the polls were nowhere even close to the election results. That tells me the polls were either garbage, or rigged to try to influence the election.
I think with the election polls one of the big issues is exactly the problem you describe earlier. Getting an accurate, representative sample is very difficult. Especially when voting for Trump was, for many people, a kind of social suicide.
That said, you might be right. I am inclined to believe that policy questions, even with all the hidden complication behind implementing said policies, are probably answered honestly and I'm assuming that the sampling is relatively 'honest' too. But I don't know this, and it's absolutely fair to challenge me on that.
What I'll do, one of these days, is look more into this because while I don't think my beliefs depend on the accuracy of these polls, I do think it's important that my beliefs are truthful (as well as my claims). If you're not just interested in defending your beliefs or attacking mine (which I'm not saying you are), I'd very much like it if we could both look further into this and at some point continue the discussion with more than our respective assumptions :). I'm happy to be corrected if the facts are on your side.
How is it hypocritical when the article doesn't even mention the US at all? It's possible to be critical of China's authoritarianism AND whatever the US's failures are.
Saying "X doesn't work" never necessarily implies that "Y does work", especially when options Z, A, B, and C still exist.
Although, ironically, they originate in China because of too little government control over hygiene in wet markets and game meat, not too much authoritarianism.
China isn't unique here, it's also the case for most of Africa and other South East Asian countries.
China (country), India and Africa (continent) each separately have > 1/6 of the World Population.
So, even if human disease came randomly, it would have a 50% chance of being from these 3 areas.
What is surprising is that the high population densities of the Philippines haven't correlated to disease.
Granted, there's an underground in every country I'm sure, and if all things were equal with the rules and enforcement, your argument would be much more reasonable.
The Chinese government promotes "traditional medicine" for nationalistic reasons, and I suspect it's playing a significant role in these zoonotic diseases -- not to mention the extinction of rhinos and whatnot.
The federal and local governments in the U.S. do not have the same power as CCP to suppress the "rumor". The eight doctors would not have been reprimanded by the local police for discussing the new virus in private online groups. The Trump administration would not have power to tell the CDC to shut up. The Trump administration would not have power to force the CDC to under-report counts. The states would not cooperate with the federal government to under-report counts.
The dust-up with the NOAA and the White House last year over a hurricane is probably a good model for what a CDC / White House disagreement might look like. Recall that during that episode, the White House directed NOAA to disavow the claims of forecasters that went against the president’s claim that Alabama was in Dorian’s line of fire.
"Calling China blind while we still have our eyes shut."
Many Chinese language forums in the US are reporting people with symptoms that match Covid-19 and testing negative for the common flu, yet are denied CDC RT-PCR testing because they do not meet the stringent criteria set. Add to this the fact that the CDC's initial test is flawed and a new test is still nowhere to be seen.
This will go very badly in the US. The average citizen need to start preparing for a pandemic.
The point is, it's not like in Wuhan, where you have reports of 10s to hundreds of people dying from a mysterious pneumonia, before the government even acknowledges it. It's not like you have the government telling people everything is okay, and to go back to work, and anyone who says anything differently gets welded into their apartment and shut off from the Internet.
Meanwhile, nobody trusts China's numbers. Initially it was to to keep the narrative under control, and now it's probably because they've lost control of the situation. Now Iran suddenly says, "oops, we actually have coronavirus and it's pretty bad."
with that said, the underlying critique is valid: there is more overt pressure for information-hiding in an authoritarian regime. but boeing, for example, shows that you don't need an authoritarian communist system to want to look good to people who have influence over your livelihood and stature (and thereby suppress bad information).