BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

uziq wrote:

how have you 'peaked' when you've done almost nothing to control the disease? lots of countries have had 1 or 2 day 'dips' in infection rates, fwiw.

lil_droo wrote:

uziq wrote:

how have you 'peaked' when you've done almost nothing to control the disease? lots of countries have had 1 or 2 day 'dips' in infection rates, fwiw.

lol how have we not done anything? social distancing guidelines and basically shut down the economy to quarantine. u don't live out here bro. LA is fairly dead except for essential workers and shit. and now a lot of ppl u do see out are wearing masks and gloves etc. don't say we aren't doing anything to control this lol

and jay i think the 2 million estimate was like worst case scenario if we didn't do any social distancing etc. i heard something the other day that we're actually looking at less than 100,000 dead (80,000 i think it was) after this is all over. down a lot from 100k-240k or whatever they were acting like was basically a given. prolly gonna even be less than the 80k tbh

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Larssen wrote:

So all the news on the corona crisis in the US incl. Trump are pushing the notion that this week will be the worst week. I don't know how they got to that conclusion.

On average, going from first symptoms to death takes 18 days. 18 days ago the US had 9000 confirmed cases. 11 days ago it was 100k. Less than a third of today's total cases were determined between 11-18 days ago.

The worst week isn't going to be this week. It's this week, the week after and the week following that one. April is going to be 'the worst month' before a noticeable decline in confirmed cases, ICU admissions and deaths. The same has been true in Italy and Spain: it's a month of hell (at least), not a week.

Trump is pushing a political narrative completely disconnected from the reality of the crisis he's facing. That's going to be fun next week, but I'm sure everyone will just pretend like they never said anything.

I'm just going to drop this here, again, for the third time:

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Supposedly Trump's approval rating is 49% through all this.

Who Are the Voters Behind Trump's Higher Approval Rating? 4/1
https://www.yahoo.com/news/voters-behin … 19015.html

Justin Penn, a Pittsburgh voter who calls himself politically independent, favored Joe Biden in a matchup with President Donald Trump until recently. But the president’s performance during the coronavirus outbreak has Penn reconsidering.

“I think he’s handled it pretty well,” he said of the president, whose daily White House appearances Penn catches on Facebook after returning from his job as a bank security guard. “I think he’s tried to keep people calm,” he said. “I know some people don’t think he’s taking it seriously, but I think he’s doing the best with the information he had.”

Although Penn, 40, said he did not vote for Trump, his opinion of the president has improved recently and he very well might back him for a second term.

Across the country, the coronavirus has sickened more than 150,000 people, cost millions their jobs and tanked the stock market. Yet the president’s approval ratings are as high as they have ever been, despite what most agree to be his slow performance dealing with the crisis, as well as his record of falsehoods about the virus, his propensity to push ideas and treatments that contradict expert advice, and his habit of lashing out at governors on the front lines.

While public perceptions are fluid in a crisis, a notable twist in polling at this point is that independents are driving Trump’s bump in approval, and some increased Democratic support is a factor as well. Gallup called that “highly unusual for Trump” in reporting its latest survey, which was released last week and showed Trump’s approval rating at 49%, equal to the best of his presidency.

continues

smh

2020 Presidential Odds: Analysis, Betting Information and Tips 4/2-4/6
https://www.oddsshark.com/politics/2020 … ds-futures

Along with the usual political bickering in the comments section.

Vegas Odds And Betting Lines For The 2020 Presidential Election
https://www.vegaselectionodds.com

Larssen wrote:

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Larssen wrote:

So all the news on the corona crisis in the US incl. Trump are pushing the notion that this week will be the worst week. I don't know how they got to that conclusion.

On average, going from first symptoms to death takes 18 days. 18 days ago the US had 9000 confirmed cases. 11 days ago it was 100k. Less than a third of today's total cases were determined between 11-18 days ago.

The worst week isn't going to be this week. It's this week, the week after and the week following that one. April is going to be 'the worst month' before a noticeable decline in confirmed cases, ICU admissions and deaths. The same has been true in Italy and Spain: it's a month of hell (at least), not a week.

Trump is pushing a political narrative completely disconnected from the reality of the crisis he's facing. That's going to be fun next week, but I'm sure everyone will just pretend like they never said anything.

I'm just going to drop this here, again, for the third time:

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Supposedly Trump's approval rating is 49% through all this.

Who Are the Voters Behind Trump's Higher Approval Rating? 4/1
https://www.yahoo.com/news/voters-behin … 19015.html


smh

2020 Presidential Odds: Analysis, Betting Information and Tips 4/2-4/6
https://www.oddsshark.com/politics/2020 … ds-futures

Along with the usual political bickering in the comments section.

Vegas Odds And Betting Lines For The 2020 Presidential Election
https://www.vegaselectionodds.com

Bush's approval rating spiked to 71% on the eve of the Iraq war. Crisis 'unites' a country behind its leader. If you look at it in this perspective, Trump's approval ratings are shockingly low in these circumstances. He only barely managed to woo a few extra %, for now.

Jay wrote:

Climate change, its just weather, so totally overblown.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-04-06 16:36:59)

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-04-06 16:45:15)

Donald Trump has said he asked US pharmaceutical companies working on experimental coronavirus drugs to approach Boris Johnson’s doctors and offer their help, after it emerged that the British prime minister was in intensive care.

In an evening press briefing, Trump did not name the companies or the drugs, but earlier in the day he held a conference about therapeutic drugs with the heads of four US pharmaceutical and biotech companies: Amgen, Genetech, Gilead, and Regeneron.

Trump has consistently promoted the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine in combination with an antibiotic azithromycin, as a “game-changer” in the battle with coronavirus, although his own health officials have cautioned that there is no proof they are effective.

I’ve asked two of the leading companies ... They’ve come with the solutions and just have done incredible jobs – and I’ve asked him to contact London immediately,” Trump said. “They’ve really advanced therapeutics … and they have arrived in London already. The London office has whatever they need. We’ll see if we can be of help. We’ve contacted all of Boris’s doctors, and we’ll see what is going to take place, but they are ready to go.”

Donald Trump was warned at the end of January by one of his top White House advisers that coronavirus had the potential to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans and derail the US economy, unless tough action were taken immediately, new memos have revealed.

The memos were written by Trump’s economic adviser Peter Navarro and circulated via the National Security Council widely around the White House and federal agencies. They show that even within the Trump administration alarm bells were ringing loudly by late January, at a time when the president was consistently downplaying the threat of Covid-19.

According to the Times, it said: “The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on US soil. This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”

The second memo went even further, predicting that a Covid-19 pandemic, left unchecked, could kill 1.2m Americans and infect as many as 100m.

This was not the first time Trump and his White House team were warned that the virus had the potential to devastate the US and needed to be dealt with quickly and firmly. Senior scientists, epidemiologists, and health emergency experts in the US and around the world delivered that message clearly early on in the crisis, only for Trump to continue belittling the scale of the threat which he compared falsely to the dangers of seasonal flu.

But the emergence of the memos from such a senior aide within the White House will make it much more difficult for Trump to claim – as he has done on multiple occasions – that nobody was able to predict the severity of the disease. As the pandemic has swept across the country, the president has come under mounting criticism for having done too little, too late in response, leading to mass shortages of diagnostic testing, protective gear for frontline health workers and ventilators for the very sick.

Larssen wrote:

So we have:

1. Systemic dismantling of your country's early warning system and pandemic preparedness through the removal of the NSC's global health unit, including failing to replace the health experts who left before/during/after this happened.

2. Willfully ignoring memos and intelligence end of january alerting him to the possibility of a pandemic. Worse, publicly contradicting any such notion.

3. Incapable of organising a streamlined, efficient response at the national level. Instead Pence was randomly chosen to head the response incl the weird role of Trump's daughter's husband.

4. Wildly, angrily striking out at anything or anyone that doesn't praise him or his response. Needing constant affirmation, whatever Trump does in a day often seem to hinge on his emotional state of mind rather than logic.

The best thing about Trump's administration is the people who stayed around to serve the public good regardless of the person in the oval office, i.e. Fauci and his team. Literally everything else about the blundering orange primate was and is either negligent, incompetent or might be typified as reckless endangerment.

It is baffling how all the above is continually glossed over by a frighteningly large proportion of the US public. The ineptitude, the nepotism - of course it all was obvious years ago, but it's rather shocking that even in the worst crisis since 9/11 it still goes largely unregistered. His supporters and cheerleading publications fail to see any sort of issue. IMO politically the US has managed to devolve into a complete banana republic, only saved from the deep end by a somewhat robust bureaucracy and legal code. When the neocons came to power in 2000 and Bush managed to be re-elected I didn't think it could be worse, yet here we are. While the next weeks/months are crucial it seems the fundamental flaws in the system that gave rise to this succession of inept morons will remain and won't be addressed. It will be a surprise if the US political reality doesn't get even worse in the coming decades.