[1] https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=chn&are...
Or put more simply: We would be a lot better off if everyone would just shut the fuck up for 10 minutes.
Healthcare is a political issue. Pretty much everything is a political issue. To pretend otherwise is to bury your head in the sand.
It literally means politician politics, or politicians' politics (a politician is a political figure, like an elected official), and it very derogatorily qualifies all the noise, the blablabla, the unimportant chatter in politics — Wherein politics speaks of egos, not ideas; the part that seldom leads to actual or worthwhile "policy".
When a leader is said to be making “de la politique politicienne”, it basically means that's degree zero of intelligent discourse, and solely aimed at tackling political opponents. Cue false claims, supporting opinions you provably don't believe yourself (but party line prevails), etc.
It's an old expression, before my time (1980s). It's fallen out of flavor. Probably because 99% of politics has now become de la politique politicienne...
Would you like to have the same death rates as Italy (much higher than US)? No.
Is the disease eradicated in either country? No.
The story of who did better remains to be written.
If anything California shut down way too soon. That's the problem that no one seems to talk about.
What?
UK: 642
Spain: 576
Italy: 575
France: 441
US: 365
Netherlands 340
EU Average: 208
Germany: 107
I dont have an easy way to adjust for demographics, but the median age of most of the countries listed is 2-3 years greater than the US. Italy is ~ 6.
Italy is also not the richest country with the highest per capita ICU bed availability with a ridiculously expensive healthcare system which while terrible for general welfare was excellently places for an emergency like the pandemic.
And if California shut down too early, it was still not a bad decision because you did not know what a good decision was at the time.
The fundamental problem in the US has not been shutdowns. It’s been shutdowns which have involved absolutely no planning for the reopenings.
That’s the fundamental disaster in the US handling of the situation. The northeast could maybe be forgiven for not doing planning for reopening because they were actually dealing with a crisis during the shutdown. But the rest of the country had no excuse. And unlike the northeast they weren’t the first to be hit, so they had time to see and prepare.
Instead, they declared it a Northeast problem as if the virus could tell Jersey Shore residents from South beach residents, and decided to go on with their lives without any planning or preparation anyways.
Don’t know what you guys are seeing on the media but I’ve been in China since February and the response has been pretty reasonable and very effective, at least from where I’m sitting. Before I came back in early Feb I thought about fleeing to the US, but haven’t entertained the idea since.
Compare the states of New York and New Jersey to the country of Italy. That is a more fair comparison. Not USA -> Italy.
One more thing. Italy didn't beat it. As soon as free movement is restored to the EU, it will spread again. The only thing that would prevent that is the ballyhooed theory that there is latent immunity in 40-60% of the population. If that is the case, than yes Lombardy is in the clear.
But if that is the case, then we also ruined the economy over a disease that was only going to infect a quarter of the people feared, and kill even less. Changes the math, doesn't it?
Edit: Fixed my stupidity about regions of my own country.
To be fair, in my opinion neither region "defeated" the virus - they just ran out of people that could be easily infected.
The seropositivity in NYC is probably pushing 30-40 percent now.
I will say that being susceptible is not evenly distributed across a population. This is why prisons, meat packing and old people homes are more likely to have outbreaks. The corollary to that is that R0 is not consistent in a population. The R0 for people who live in old folks home is far higher than a bachelor who works from home.
So when the person said that they ran out of easy people to infect, that is absolutely true.
The goal should be to minimize spread among the most vulnerable.
NY/NJ are not part of New England. And what's your definition of "uncontrolled community spread"? [Other places like Louisiana surely qualified. Edit: never mind, I didn't parse LA as Louisiana.] Would you say it's now "uncontrolled" in say Arizona or South Carolina?
I lied! NY and NJ are not in New England. The USA is annoying.
New York and New Jersey are mid Atlantic states.
Maybe they should be more careful with their choice of name, New England has been used for over 400 years to refer to something that definitely doesn’t include Manhattan or New Jersey.
The name even has a precise administrative meaning today, as does Middle Atlantic: https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/maps-data/maps/reference/us...
In other contexts New England is usually used correctly, though I have seen people include NY and/or the original 13 colonies as "New England"
That said I didn't know about the mid-atlantic administrative region, thanks for that info. It seems really weird to call NY, which borders Canada, mid-atlantic and have it stop at the south of NJ, especially when east north central goes further south. South atlantic looks about 2-3x bigger than mid and definitely goes way past the north-south halfway point of the east coast.
We can minimize it somewhat, but lots of people are going to die. If we locked down completely, lots of people would die of a litany of other things that would have normally been prevented in an open society. Fucked either way.
See my point?
For the US to still cry about China is embarrassing.
I am not crying about China. It is the truth. The only way to prevent uncontrolled spread would have been to stop it before it became uncontrolled. The fact that the first cases were in Cali. in December shows how impossible that really is for a non-island nation (caveat only because NZ)
The main point I was making is that it isn't possible! By the time China had enough data to detect a novel virus, it was too late. It would have always been too late. China isn't to blame. This could just have easily of jumped species in Canada or the US. The point is that we can't be gods no matter how much we tell ourselves we are just that.