California, Oregon and Washington announce western states pact

You can roughly see where you would expect these to form on this map. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaregions_of_the_United_Stat...

This (along with the NE pact) is probably a big "no, you're not" to Trump.

* Nursing homes, long-term care facilities, etc. will get some priority and focus.

* Socioeconomically-disadvantaged communities are taking indirect impacts from mitigation measures, and they will also get some priority and focus.

* We will not return to anything resembling normal until we have a way to efficiently test, track, and isolate at scale.

He was complaining to me the other day that Oregon's requirement that you are not allowed to pump your own gas is an obvious COVID transmission vector.

To get gas in Oregon, he follows these steps:

1.) pull up to gas station 2.) Roll down window to hand attendant (who isn't wearing a mask, nor is required to) his debit card. 3.) Get card back from attendant. 4.) Sanitize the debit card 5.) Sanitize his hands 6.) Hope that the attendant is washing his hands, and that he didn't breathe COVID onto him through the open window.

Not saying this isn't a great, noble effort.

Just saying that, in some aspects, these states aren't doing a good job on obvious things within their own borders.

Why the hell is Oregon still doing this, and not requiring masks from gas attendants anyway? Maybe it is required, but my brother told me he has yet to have an attendant wearing a mask, so possibly not enforced???

It seems nonplussed has two, almost contradictory definitions:

1. (of a person) surprised and confused so much that they are unsure how to react.

2. (of a person) not disconcerted; unperturbed.

The latter is an "informal" definition. This seems to be the process by which the word awful switched from meaning awe-inspiring to the opposite.

Trump has been downplaying the seriousness of the disaster since January. He contradicts the statements of his own staff in the same press conference as the staff speaks. He exuberantly proclaims the effectiveness of "treatments" that haven't been studied in any serious way. All this is to say that we can't trust any decision he makes.

Contrast this with the way the Western governors have handled this. Inslee was one of the first governors to announce any kind of Social Distancing rules. And he followed Illinois in issuing a statewide Stay Home order that is probably the most restrictive such order in the states. There's a lot of evidence on the Washington DOH website that this is working and the spread of the disease is under control.

The fact is that Trump's response is mostly to bury the problem and apply wishful thinking when he can't bury the problem. The governors in this union are taking a facts-based approach to solving the problem that has largely been successful. And so it's a really bad idea to do anything that Trump advises the country to do because he has a track record of making really bad decisions throughout this crisis.

I think they flipped the fuckit bit.

Even when reopening is clearly the right thing to do nobody will want to personally take the fall. It's the reason the US has a high incarceration rate, nobody wants to be the one to release a ton of people from jail even if it's the right thing to do.

Do you have any actual data for this?

I'm curious if these recently announced state pacts will be challenged in court. But legal or illegal, it doesn't excuse the poor job of federal management.

Of note: "Not all compacts between states require explicit Congressional approval – the 1893 Supreme Court decision in Virginia v. Tennessee affirmed that only those agreements which would increase the power of states at the expense of the federal government required it."

I'm not claiming that this pact is formally one of these "interstate compacts", but your maximalist reading of that article forbidding "all kinds of agreements" seems to be incorrect.

However, we have pretty good estimates on how many people will die if we don't shelter and isolate, and I think that trumps what would inevitably be some very vague guesses as to how many people might die as side effects of sheltering and isolation.

And regardless, many of those potential deaths could be preventable with the right focus on mental health and financial support during and after the lockdown. (Not saying we do have the right focus; I expect we definitely don't. But that's not a reason to give up on isolation.)

https://www.pandemiceconomist.com/2020/04/costs-and-benefits... TL;DR (copied directly from the post):

With these values, if a lockdown of two years or less will stop the COVID-19 pandemic, it is a good idea. With the current research into treatments and vaccines and the development of testing and tracing strategies, I believe that there will be a medical or public health way to stop the pandemic in less than two years. Notably, the net benefit of a decision to initiate or sustain lockdown goes up over time, because the time remaining until medical countermeasures are available keeps going down.

The pandemic is eroding the idea that sickness and poverty are moral failings. It that sticks the benefits will be huge.

Oh, and there has been the first month without a school shooting since 2002. Another epidemic controlled by staying at home.

> Ensuring an ability to care for those who may become sick with COVID-19 and other conditions. This will require adequate hospital surge capacity and supplies of personal protective equipment.

Delaying it is the point, it ensures we have enough hospital capacity and PPE to handle the inevitable burst of cases when reopening. This is what people mean when they say "flatten the curve". If we simply open whenever and aren't prepared we'll have a massive spike in cases that exceeds hospital capacity, vs the current situation where the case growth is slower and hospitals are less burdened.

Let’s just say it’s very much bad for your neighborhood of states to have that kind of situation. Closing borders or having diplomatic disasters isn’t worth it. It’s better to reach a common decision.

For those unfamiliar, Cascadia is an independence movement around the NW bioregion of the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_(independence_movemen...

Edit to add more info:

While many Pacific NW folks are not familiar with Cascadia as an independence movement, fans of the Portland, Oregon soccer (football) team Portland Timbers often carry or fly the Cascadia independence movement's flag during games. Shown on the right side of this giant tifo:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2012/jun/28/portla...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone

(...sorry)

Legally, is this possible in the US?

In Australia for example each state has closed or is controlling their borders with each other, and this seems to largely be a decision for each state (I don't think there's a federal law either way). I could imagine some states choosing to open up while others remain closed. Or if two states made big sacrifices but got the issue under control, while the others lagged behind, those two could open borders between themselves while remaining closed outside.

We do, however by design that body does not have authoritarian control over things like 'shelter at home' regulations.

If that centralized and coordinated leadership is incompetent and/or corrupt, there is no Plan B.

Centralization requires buy-in, and after at some point it becomes clear that sitting around waiting for other states to play ball can be equally disastrous.

We do! It's called the United States government. I'll be letting the president know you're interested in him taking over and using his own ideas, instead of this one you seem to be particularly fond of.

Or, if that idea is slightly terrifying for you, perhaps it's a better idea that the states are handling this themselves. Your state conglomeration thing can always decide to use the National Guard to prevent outside travelers.

We're talking about forcibly keeping everyone in the country out of church. It's pretty disturbing to give that power to government, even temporarily. How long before it gets applied to other situations after the pandemic dies down?

What's to stop the president in 2030 from saying: "We're facing an epidemic of terrorism by [whoever] so we're keeping them from gathering in public."

Or: "There's an epidemic of [some crime] that uses the internet. We need to control it."

Why fear? This is my dream!

The Senate is irreparably broken. There is no conceivable way that it can become more fairly representative of the people without a breakup of the United States. The smaller less populous states aren't going to just give up their outsized power voluntarily.

California is suffering the most due to the Senate's structural unfairness, and it has the most to gain from succession. I hope it happens in my lifetime.

That seems pretty far-fetched.

Much more likely (and welcome) would be a sort of "legal coup", where the states that still have functioning governments band together in the task of reshaping the federal government through voting and legislative power.

We're certainly approaching a breaking point in the dysfunction of the federal government and its inability to do its job and serve a society; something has got to give. But I still think any kind of civil war scenario remains far, far out of the question.

When Trump threaten to "shutdown" travel between the North East States, people had to tell him that he did not have the authority to do that.