Trump Declares National Emergency
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Regions are declaring they own measures in the meantime, in Madrid, schools and universities classes have stopped, all shops must stay closed, only pharmacies and supermarkets are allowed to be open, also most business where people gather, such as gyms, stay closed.
In Catalonia no one can enter or exit.
This is only for four cities of Barcelona, not the entire area. Like the 1% of the population. Is an unprecedented measure in any case. Lots of social experiments this days.
If the kits themselves have an accuracy rate of ~60% as I've heard mentioned here and elsewhere, wouldn't faster testing (ex. 3 hour, 1 hour) reduce accuracy even more and create "diagnostic theater" as an analogy to the security theater already witnessed at airports?
Would love to hear more about this from an epidemiological standpoint.
Wash your hands a lot.
Encourage other people to do the same things.
Can anyone verify if this logic makes sense? Or does it not really make a difference because it'll just float through the air and reach your face anyway?
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/artic...
Instructions in English.
There are plenty of photos Italians queuing up two meters apart, so just maintain extra space like they do?
If you're old, self-isolation is the best thing.
Tell your friends to do the same.
Note: 60 days of food is probably much larger than any grocery trip you have ever done. Don't just go to the store and get a week's worth of food, like many are doing. In a week, grocery shopping will be impossible/dangerous. Two weeks, moreso. The doubling time on this thing is about a week and it's going to get worse for six weeks before it gets better.
Also, avoid doing any activities that might cause any sort of accident requiring hospitalization. Hospitals are going to be hard no-go zones starting in about two weeks, for 6-8 weeks. Use the railing, be careful getting in and out of the shower, clean up spills, don't use power tools, et c.
If you're having trouble getting groceries locally, Amazon still (for the moment! don't expect it to last) has 12-ct cases of Soylent in stock for about $40 in a lot of places for same or next-day delivery. (Figure 5 400kcal bottles per person-day for emergency rations if you can't get any local groceries. Even if you don't like it, it will keep you and your family alive while you can't go to the supermarket for a few weeks.) TIP YOUR DELIVERY DRIVER. When it arrives, pull the bottles out wearing gloves, and dispose of the boxes carefully, and WASH YOUR HANDS.
EDIT: Reply to SketchySeaBeast below (I am throttled and cannot post new replies):
Going to the grocery store is unnecessary contact/exposure that you can avoid by stocking up for the duration in advance. Grocery stores are chokepoints. It's better to shop once now than four times over the next 2 months.
Shelf-stable food that you will eat anyway is not a huge cost, and limiting your exposure is valuable as this thing ramps up. Every passing week for the foreseeable future doubles the risk that you will encounter someone who has the virus, as it seems pretty plausible (due to the testing strategy) that the US, at least based on current information, will be doing very little that will be effective to stop the spread.
It's probably just going to run its course unimpeded through society in the US, as it did in Italy prior to the lockdown. Would you want to be going to the grocery store in Italy right now? I don't want to be going to the grocery store in the US in 2-3 weeks.
Remember: when China had as many cases as we do now, a 60M province was already in total lockdown.
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...
This is crazy FUD that will only make the situation worse. Stockpiling rarely, if ever, helps, and overwhelmingly hurts the poor and disabled. The absolute worst of "fuck you got mine" mentality on display here. Please do not do this, and please do not advocate for this kind of panic. You are actively contributing to a terrible situation.
To repeat: there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to stockpile rations, food stuffs, common goods, etc. In no country as of yet has this been necessary, even in the most hard hit areas. Do not do this. Going to the grocery store once vs four times is not going to make the difference between you getting the virus or not, and it's absurd that people would even consider this. The virus has been in and around our communities for months now, engaging in prepper fetishes now is closing the barn door after the horses have left. Stockpiling goods is completely ineffective anyway. The majority of our supply chains are JIT, and suppliers are already rationing and metering out goods. Stockpiling is pointless, you're just going to look like an idiot in the check out line.
Limit large social engagements. Keep up mild exercise, get plenty of sleep, and eat healthily. And for the love of God wash your hands. If you have frequent contact with immunocompromised people or the elderly be more vigilant about hygiene, wear a mask, disinfect any surfaces the both of you touch frequently. Consider doing their errands for them as well.
Everyone will eventually get the virus. It's almost certain. The goal here is just to prevent a thundering herd problem with medical resources.
That's exactly how I feel about stuff like that. I had only heard a quarantine's amount, but given the amount of made up stuff going around, I was hoping there'd be some sort of expert explaining the logic, and for it not to be just prepper fever.
> This is crazy FUD
There's no fear, uncertainty, or doubt in my message, nor am I being crazy, simply calm and rational: it's simple, normal preparedness for the recommended protocol of avoiding unnecessary close physical contact with others. Having 6-8 weeks of food in one's house isn't stockpiling, nor is it panic. It is everyday preparedness, and is good advice in all times, even outside of pandemics.
The LDS church, for example, recommends and encourages all mormons to have a year of food for their family in their home, and has done so for decades. I am not LDS, but this is not bad advice in general.
> Going to the grocery store once vs four times is not going to make the difference between you getting the virus or not
If you and your family are in full isolation at home during the worst of this, not going out in public at all during the peak of the pandemic (zero contact with anyone infected or potentially infected) versus going out four times into public places (grocery stores) absolutely makes a difference, both in your own potential exposure, as well as in the ability to spread it to others should you be exposed.
Right now most cities in the US only have a few hundred cases walking around (calculated from comparing the curve to other countries who actually are testing). That's not going to be the case in 30 days: the risk and spread is going up in a predictable, exponential fashion, just as we have seen in several other places already.
> engaging in prepper fetishes
Your alarming personal attacks do not contribute to the discussion. I'm not suggesting you build a bunker, hoard masks or TP, or anything else like that: simply have enough food to be able to stay home uninterrupted for a month or two. Mocking doomsday preppers when they're preparing for unknown, low-risk imagined threats is one thing. Preparing to simply have enough to eat while you and your family stay home during a global pandemic and presently-declared national emergency is about as non-prepper as it gets: preppers would claim it's way past the time you should have started.
Millions of Americans buy in bulk at stores like Sam's Club and Costco, this is no different. If the supply lines are as stable as you claim and will remain so as you claim, then they won't be harmed in any way by a few people buying a little bit extra.
> Everyone will eventually get the virus. It's almost certain.
This is also not true. Many people will avoid getting sick by avoiding public places and physical contact, which also has the added public benefit of not spreading it further. Additionally there will likely be a vaccine before the year is out. Avoiding contact with the public absolutely can and will prevent many people from getting sick. Please do not engage in such fatalistic fear-spreading; it's just a false statement. (It's also a terrible thing to say to high-risk groups, most of whom can avoid contracting it with precautions such as I describe.)
> The goal here is just to prevent a thundering herd problem with medical resources.
The single best way to do that is to avoid contracting the virus at all. The single best way to do that is to avoid coming into contact with anyone who is infected or might be infected: get home and stay home.
It is our responsibility to ourselves, our families, our neighbors, and our communities to avoid contracting this virus and to avoid spreading this virus.
Not sure if I'd agree with this. In my neighborhood, there are already multiple confirmed cases (some a few blocks away).
The only way to minimize my (and therefore my family's) exposure to the virus is to avoid any external contact. Encountering 10 people for one grocery trip versus 40 people over 4 separate trips. Statistically, I'd take the one-trip option.
Even if there was a marginal benefit to yourself it would be still be incredibly selfish to stockpile to the detriment of the vulnerable. The scarcity mentality is very dangerous, please do not perpetuate it.
It has nothing to do with scarcity and everything to do with limiting social contact. Every day, being out in public is more dangerous.
As you pointed out, there is no scarcity issue, nor is there likely to be.
> Everyone will eventually get the virus. It's almost certain. The goal here is just to prevent a thundering herd problem with medical resources.
Yes, eventually everyone will be exposed. The point here is to flatten the curve of exposure to a level which does not overwhelm critical care facilities. This can be achieved - or at least an attempt can be made - by limiting exposure. Those who have enough food at home to refrain from having to go out shopping for a month can limit their exposure more than those who have to go out every week.
> Going to the grocery store once vs four times is not going to make the difference between you getting the virus or not, and it's absurd that people would even consider this.
But that is not the point as you later state yourself: "The goal here is just to prevent a thundering herd problem with medical resources". Right, and the way to achieve that is by limiting exposure, for instance by only having to go out shopping once instead of four times.
I honestly don't get the attitude against a certain level of preparedness. What is wrong with stocking more non-perishable food stuffs at home if those are the things you'd normally buy anyway? You don't need to fill your basements with MREs, just get more of the usual non-perishables than you'd normally do - pasta, wheat flour, oats, etc. Get some yeast to bake bread as well while you're at it. Get butter, put it in the freezer. Dried beans last forever - I had some around which I took with me when I moved from the Netherlands to Sweden about 20 years ago, made a chilli with them, tasted 'like new' - and can make a good meal with a few odds and ends. Get 'canned' (i.e. packaged) tomatoes, frozen vegetables (the power will stay on during this crisis), etc. This is not doomsday prepping, it is common sense.
I have no problem with this, but that's clearly not what GP is advocating for. I doubt most in this thread even comprehend how much food is required for a 30 day supply of your average household. Buying double the amount of perishables doesn't seem unreasonable, stocking up for a month+ is absurd.
The Department of Health and Human Services has recommended that intelligence community personnel have at least three months’ worth of food on hand in the event of an uncontrolled pandemic.
Many countries have been or are in much worse shape and society hasn't broken down. This isn't Mad Max. If anything having the entire population simultaneously buy two months of food is going to cause far more problems than it'll ever solve.
That is where he gets this: basic common sense. Limit exposure, limit spread, flatten the infection curve to such a level that the peak 10-15% which will need hospitalisation does not exceed the available capacity.
To another reply: you're correct, this is a big point that few people are thinking about.
He didn't necessarily take responsibility of anything, but he managed to suppress his usual behavior well enough for the people behind him to assure people
If you’re trying to say “who cares about money when lives are on the line”... in this case a strong, life-saving, response begets a positive market response.
People drying en-masse is not good for the economy, or anyone really. Also, recessions are generally not good for people’s health.
Trump going up there and making a bunch of positive statements means zero right now. The public and private sectors have no reason to trust the federal government during this situation.
Literally no one but yourself has implied the stock market going well means Coronavirus is going away.
That’s so absurd I gave you the benefit of the doubt and assumed something was lost in your wording...
The comment chain is about the effect of the virus on electability of an incumbent.
The stock market’s performance is very much tied to that and while not the only indicator of an election's outcome, is a pretty strong motivator of political change.
On that note... since his speech a ton of bad news has come out, some his claims were proven false, the fed hit the nuclear options, and futures hit a circuit breaker Sunday night which is a terrible indicator for this morning’s market.
So it’s still a strong factor in his electability, just not in the direction it was Friday evening.
On the other hand, it's much easier to rally people when your villain has an actual human face.
That should have a footnote. Pancho Villa's División del Norte invaded the US in a raid on Columbus, NM in 1916. The Japanese Army occupied the small and remote Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska during WWII. These are both minor incidents, hence a footnote.
If we expand "US soil" beyond the U.S. continent (or the 50 states), then the Japanese occupations of the Philippines, Guam and Wake Island should also count.
The Commonwealth of the Philippines was not fully independent from the US. Guam is an organized territory of the US, and Wake Island is an unorganized, unincorporated territory of the US. (I'm not sure about their exact territorial status in WWII though.)
has never had to deal with a war on US soil since Lincoln
1) Almost everyone in the world who is susceptible has it, or had it.
2) We implemented a way to slow down the global growth rate, or it slowed down by itself.
One way or another, we will know in a just a few months.
If you want to check the math, skip to about 3:20 on this video from 3Blue1Brown, Exponential growth and epidemics.
The problem is than when we will reach summer, half of the planet will start the winter. A interesting question is if the coronavirus will be able to hide in the southern hemisphere or not. That would start and endless migration cycle from now on.
a lot of people died in Italy https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/
I think we are at the point where we will see a lot of infections. I think we will see a lot of death from this as well, but it will be at the lower end of the case fatality rate range as long as we can do the things we need to in order to not overwhelm our healthcare system. If however I am wrong, and we do overwhelm the healthcare system like they did in Italy, yea, there is going to be a lot more death.
See the chart in this article for details on the 11 day difference. https://www.econlib.org/the-answer-one-week/
Here is why I don't think they are enough.
1) Isolation is not uniform across the country. Some people are working from home. Others aren't. Some schools are closed. Some aren't. Some trips are cancelled. Some planes are still flying with some people. There are still large areas of the country where it's spreading with little or no isolation. The cases there will grow, and walk across state borders.
2) It's not enough, yet. We have some isolation in some spots. But there's not yet even one single spot with measures as drastic as are needed to stop this.
Italy has had stricter measures than the US in place for a little while, and the number of new people seeking hospital care per day is still growing.
The places which have successfully turned this thing around have put measures in place much more drastic than the US, and on a consistent national basis.
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I guess we disagree about the US being more isolated than Italy or not. I think Italy has more isolation in place. Please let me know in what ways things here are more isolated than Italy.
I think it will be far more important how Trump deals with this than the simple fact of it happening.
Biden might be washed up, but it might not matter. Bloomberg is about to drop $2 Billion in advertising and infrastructure in support of the Democratic party.
I'm not saying Trump is going to lose, but if he wins, it's going to be by a narrow margin in which he loses the popular vote by more than 6 million.
No it's not. You had every expert in the world talking about the potential dangers for months, while Trump kept talking about how it was just a flu that would magically go away on its own, and that there wasn't anything to be concerned with. The US's preparation has been incredibly bad and late in comparison to certain other countries. On top of Trump firing the Pandemic Response Team in 2018.
The optics are going to start looking increasingly bad for him as the US death rate starts to climb.
I don't claim to predict the outcome of the election, but you can't claim that it's "hard to criticize the government" based off of this, or that any future "decisive action" is going to be enough once the death rate hits tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands.
Experts have been also talking about dangers of climate change for years, yet Trump manages to win election while calling climate change a hoax. So not sure his base cares about expert advice.
>while Trump kept talking about how it was just a flu that would magically go away on its own, and that there wasn't anything to be concerned with.
You should read trump's tweets, there is a shockingly large number of people agreeing with him on this like everything.
As long as trump can manage to limit the damage to the US, he will have strong arguments for a re-election.
Ah yes, yet another person who looked at the Snopes piece's headline and nothing else. One would think reading it, and the Twitter thread it is based on, that to save money (or because the Trump administration hates science, or something) the entire "US Pandemic Response Team" agency was cut to save money, causing everyone in a large DC office building to lose their jobs.
Actually reading the contemporary NBC News https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-bossert-t... and Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0... articles it cites, they seem to have been a handful of people in one team in the National Security Council hierarchy, that the new National Security Advisor reassigned to related agencies. Ziemer resigned because he wanted to keep his team the way it was.
COVID19 was not a surprise; that is, it was known to exist in China some time before the first cases appeared in the US. It is not unreasonable for a government to assemble a team to respond to something like a pandemic as needed, as opposed to having people dedicated solely to the purpose and nothing else. And that's exactly what the US did, implementing the ban on non-American travelers who'd been to China in late January, among other things.
You may or may not agree with this. But please don't claim that this is somehow prima facie proof of the Trump administration's malfeasance/evilness.
PS - No, Trump did not "cut the CDC budget!" either. https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104
The comparison between how the different countries will care for their population is unavoidable, and the results in China will be proudly stellar in that time (They had reasons to be proud).
And this can't be solved with more fake news. Death values can be faked and anybody could start a badmouth campaign against South Korea to hide that they will have the lowest mortality rate (due to the korean strategy of extensive testing of the population) but in the end, death people will not vote you (neither their widows, friends and family?).
So It depends also of how people will feel about replacing Obamacare by Trumpcare. Images from the past like "Trump throwing rolls of toilet paper to puerto ricans with contempt" will not help by comparison. He always had problems showing real empathy in public.
Maybe just accept new information and correct your weird conspiracy theory.
I agree that has been the case in economically disadvantaged countries but do you think America is closer to Cuba, Venezuela or Tzarist Russia... or closer to Britain.
This is legitimately the kind of stimulus that the economy has needed for decades. A true cause for the American powerhouse to rally behind, if there's anything left of it. Yeah the administration has been less than ideal in handling this but you people need to give credit where it is due.
This will be a true test of the viability of the declining American Empire.
If you think Bernie Sanders is a socialist then this is socialism, if you think this is good then you like Sanders' level of socialism.
We are literally turning toward capitalist corporations to manufacture and sell products to solve a crisis. This is not socialism. Workers are not taking control of factories. The government is not commandeering private resources.
>Look, either socialism includes Bernie Sander's Democratic Socialism or it doesn't
You also don't seem to understand how many different flavors of socialism exist - feel free to point out how what's going on now fits under any definition. Also what does any of this have to do with Sanders?
The fact that you agree with what you read does not mean that it isn't propaganda. The man had his homeymoon in the USSR and is on video talking fondly of bread lines. I'm not saying he's Stalin 2.0 but right wing media isn't entirely stretching when they point out how far removed his policies are from American politics.
Note, that's not a value judgement. I'm just saying you're wrong to blame the shift in meaning on the particular media that you don't agree with.
I'm only being slightly sarcastic.
That's not what Socialism is.
Nit, but he only shook a couple. Certainly, the majority did not receive handshakes
Of course, he'll never say it was socialism - just "strong action".
Isn't that the ultimate stimulus?
Is the potential of returned manufacturing jobs not a hugely good thing?
Or are we not allowed to give credit for anything because Trump?
I do not know where you got the idea that this is happening.
If Trump isn't a total idiot (though I know many of you believe he is) this is his opportunity to return manufacturing jobs to the US, possibly under subsidy, at the very least as a national security concern.
This rampant tribalism is insane. Literally nothing the administration does now will see any credit from it's opponents. Take off the partisan blinders. Even shitty leaders can make good decisions, and deserve credit for doing so.
So far he's been moving in the opposite direction though with an emphasis on overall company welfare at the expense of employees - there have been no proposals around preventing people from losing their jobs due to needing to self-isolate and no effort to make treatment federally subsidized (testing is probably free if you're not one of the millions of people without insurance, but even here the details are hazy).
Do you think these companies will continue to exist if they fire all the employees who get sick from the virus? Do you think these employees will survive without their paychecks?
Do you believe that anything benefiting "corporations" goes directly into the pocket of evil 1% CEOs and confers no benefit to employees? You probably work for a corporation. Corporate well-being is employee wellbeing because corporations are staffed by people.
Also, the US manufactures more stuff than any other time in its history, it just does it with less labor than it needed in the 80's. Even if manufacturing came back, it would not be some job boon. Products would become more expensive for the same quality that we get from China. The people employed would be higher skilled and likely need to come in on visa's because we already have a skilled labor shortage in America. Hell, our U3 unemployment rate is like 3.8% the last time I checked*.
America's problem is our intransigence to help one another move to where jobs are, and to get educated in the skills needed to fill those jobs. And I'm not talking about programming jobs here.
Please remove your Orange Man Bad blinders for a minute and listen to what I'm saying. I'm not saying he's done anything for manufacturing to date. I'm saying that this coronavirus now has exposed the weakness of offshoring a substantial proportion of critical manufacturing and it's an excellent opportunity to bring back much of the capacity that is still disrupted in China.
That's also why I said under subsidy. Because manufacturing here is more expensive but it looks like a national security problem if during calamity or war we have to depend on a nation on the other side of the world for things like semiconductors, medical equipment, and medicine. Based on the way the word is being thrown around recently, think of it as "socialism."
>China is already returning to work
Don't be so sure. This is an authoritarian regime which went to great lengths to cover up the outbreak for the first month. And they claimed return to capacity weeks ago when pollution maps still showed little to no productivity. The world isn't all rainbows and sunshine - nation states are still competitive and do not always work in each other's best interest.
None of this even begins to go into all of the IP fuckery and socialization of US companies going on in China.
He struggled to pronounce "coronavirus".
Testing only those with symptoms (the virus has a 4-6 day contagious incubation period) will do little to nothing to stop the spread. There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people walking around asymptomatic and contagious right now, in pretty much every state in the country (as well as pretty much every country in the world). In a week it will be 2x that number. In two weeks it will be 4x that number.
Imagine if you needed AIDS symptoms to get an HIV test.
Did you see how the 80s and 90s played out in the US?
I'm just trying to see it from people's point of view that don't live in my reality.
This critical period is elsewhere described as (incubation - latent):
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/us/coronavirus-testing-ch...
* Only those with symptoms (which?) are going to be "allowed" to be tested. This means you can't stop the spread.
* Testing is going to "come online" within weeks, but cases are already accelerating. We have tripled cases in the last 4 days. Its an exponential curve
* I fully expect them to fudge the numbers on deaths at this point. We will start to see a large uptick within the next week.
Stopping was probably never possible anyway. But certainly there is no scenario where the whole world gets it but USA doesn't. And even places like Wuhan where it seems stooped it's highly questionable what happens if they go back to normal. Chances are high it will just start again. The 80k immune there are nowhere near enough to stop a second wave. Herd immunity needs probably around 60-80%.