This fucking idiot:
Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday took his most drastic action yet to respond to the post-reopening coronavirus surge in Texas, shutting bars back down and scaling back restaurant capacity to 50%.
He also shut down river-rafting trips, which have been blamed for a swift rise in cases in Hays County, and banned outdoor gatherings of over 100 people unless local officials approve.
“At this time, it is clear that the rise in cases is largely driven by certain types of activities, including Texans congregating in bars,” Abbott said in a news release. “The actions in this executive order are essential to our mission to swiftly contain this virus and protect public health.”
Bars must close at noon Friday, and the reduction in restaurant capacity takes effect Monday. Before Abbott’s announcement Friday, bars were able to operate at 50% capacity and restaurants at 75% capacity.
“At this time.” Let that sink in. “AT THIS TIME.” Motherfucker this was clear MONTHS ago and why every state run by reasonable, sane, people, including my redneck gomer Jim Justice and right wing anti-abortion nutjob Mike Dewine in Oho shut their fucking states down. “AT THIS TIME.” Fuck you.
Side note- some days I worry that I am losing control of the English language, because I am so exasperated with these people that all I can muster half the time is “fucking asshole” or “this fucking idiot” or “you stupid cocksucker” or something similar. I tried to come up with something different to begin this, and sat there for five minutes, and really all I could write was “This fucking idiot.” It’s just where I am now, so humor me.
Back to the point- this has been obvious for, well, in 2020 terms where every day is a week and every week is a month and every month is the longest century ever, this has been obvious for fucking ever. People with an iq over room temperature have been expecting a second wave since the start of this thing. Where they erred was that YOU FUCKING PEOPLE ARE SO AWFUL you never let us get out of the first god damned wave.
It didn’t have to be this way. Other civilized nations handled the crisis. I don’t know if it is the racism because these yokels in the south saw it hitting minority communities worse than other groups and said fuck it. I don’t know if it is just a fear of the base. I don’t know if they are just that fucking stupid. I don’t know if it is because they are greed pigs who only care about the stock market. I don’t know if they are just sociopaths who don’t care about other people. Probably some combination of all of the above plus the Baby Jeebus.
But it just didn’t have to be this way. After decades of rushing off to fight elective wars of choice, for once there is a battle we have to fight, and Republicans surrendered. And we had ample warning.
CHINA BUILT A FUCKING HOSPITAL IN TEN DAYS. That’s when I ordered masks and supplies, fer fuck’s sake. And I am no rocket surgeon. And I am bracing for the fall, when the supply chains and economy are really going to tank. I have a turkey picked out, I’m splitting a pig with a friend, I went in on a 1/4 cow with three others, I spent my stimulus check on raised beds and an irrigation system and mason jars and lids, and I am going to grow and can my ass off.
But it didn’t have to be this way. You stupid motherfuckers.
Hunter Gathers
All of them, Katie
JPL
John, We don’t have to worry about a second wave, because the first wave is never ending. fkfkfkfkfkfkkfkfk
randy khan
I’m going to guess that bars were, as usual, actually operating at 110% capacity.
randy khan
@JPL:
Yep.
Kropacetic
Now, now, cocksuckers should be revered for shared pleasurable experiences. Not lumped in with these fucknuts.
chrisanthemama
Here’s your Shakespearean insult generator, Cole (adding an f-bomb or twenty would not be amiss): http://www.literarygenius.info/a3-shakespeare-insult-generator.htm
Jim, Foolish Literalist
turned on MSNBC to watch the Pence shitshow, and he’s just stammering nonsense. Heard Birds trying to straddle a fence between trump and nonsense. Fauci seems like he’s about to blow a gasket. They are never going to admit they fucked up about masks.
the chyron tells me that Pence has moved on to defending trump on holding rallies, which is probably why he was allowed to go on the TeeVee today
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Chuck Todd finds a nut after playing a clip of Pence’s blatherskyte: “Anything to avoid that M word…”
Ramiah Ariya
I am sorry, this is not “drastic action” at all. I live in Chennai, India and we are not allowed out of homes without masks. All non-essential stores are closed down. Restaurants can only deliver in my city, and they cannot even do that after 2 PM. If we actually went out on a whim police can arrest us if we do not give good reason for being out. All public transportation is shut down. Meanwhile, there are people here clamoring for MORE drastic measures – I don’t even know what that is. We have been on this state since March 24, and the slightest relaxation caused cases to shoot up.
WereBear
It’s like they don’t even know how to be ask someone else to be competent. Which I guess I believe.
Why else does Fox News urge their viewers to ignore safety guidelines? When their viewers skew heavily senior? What kind of sense does that make?
Mike in Pasadena
No, John, it had to be this way because Republicans.
SteverinoCT
I saw the post and my first thought was, “All of Cole’s posts have become ‘This fucking idiot’ and a link.”
Sometimes that’s all you need.
Mai naem mobile
I think Orange Dbag and red state GOP governors have decided to go the herd immunity route but are just not saying it out loud. Killing off the doors, the not rich old and minorities is just a bonus. These people really do believe in a darwinism dog eat dog world where they think the weaker less able less intelligent people are being killed off. I’ve talked to a couple of these people and I am surprised my head doesn’t explode listening to them.
Kelly
The virus didn’t arrive this winter as a wave. It was a flood. It’s still raining.
“It’s been raining in the mountains and the rivers on the rise. I cannot hardly reach the other side” – Hoyt Axton
jonas
Narrator: “It was.”
trollhattan
Please don’t can your ass off, your chairs will all be really uncomfortable.
The way things are going this week I do not foresee school in the fall, and that will force a reckoning on working parents.
Mai naem mobile
ProPublica has an investigative piece where some Bay area guy is making money in Texas relabelling non healthcare certified N95 masks with certified labels and selling them. This guys karma would be being treated by a COVID asymptomatic healthcare provider using one of these masks and passing it onto him. This is just evil.
Doug R
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: WHO and CDC and other government bodies were stuck in a bad place-there wasn’t enough PPE for even medical staff, so masks had to be prioritized for them.
You saw the toilet paper shortages. You think if masks had been recommended at first it wouldn’t have been WORSE?
Gemina13
I already know we’re getting 50 lbs of salmon from the SO’s job in Alaska. I’ve been buying as much meat as I can on sale; my freezer is crammed with pork and beef, and I’m laying in supplies of chicken, bacon, sausages, and shellfish. Cans of beans and crushed tomatoes are next, along with bags of brown rice, Israeli couscous, and lentils. Now meat and fish aren’t going to be that much of a problem – WA has quite a few local butchers, and we live next to the fucking Pacific Ocean. But vegetables and fruit are going to be a bitch, I’m sure, as well as bread.
Come July, I’ll stock up on the masks and gloves, OTC medications, and Neosporin.
I’m an English major. I’ve worked for lawyers, financial firms, and tech writing companies. Yet I find my brain locks up tight when I witness the daily idiocies of the GOP, and I’m reduced to snarling, “Get fucked sideways, you stupid shitheels,” every time. So much for that expensive degree and voracious reading habit. Days like these make me really miss my mother; she had a command of profanity that would make a DI blanch.
The Moar You Know
I thought he was all in favor of the olds dying so we could get Murica’s economy back and roaring for FOUR MOAR YEARS OF OUR GOD-EMPEROR TRUMP
Or was that the psycho lieutenant governor? Can’t keep my idiots straight.
Suzanne
@Mai naem mobile: I don’t know if they actually think they’re going down a route at all. I think they just do what feels good and don’t think about consequences at all. Basically they just have FOMO and are governing like it.
Fuck, people are fucking stupid.
Leto
The Moar You Know
Not to worry. There are really no other words available to convey the magnitude of his incompetence. I’ve tried too.
ronno2018
You ARE correct to be extremely angry about the bad red state governors!!!!
But do not underestimate the ability for correct policies and better treatment knowledge to keep the death rate down and the economy OK.
I am worried about your meat eating. LOL. I am worried about my beer consumption… HANG IN THERE!
Spc
@Hunter Gathers: and some of them are the base with all the CT, resentment and rage.
Nicole
Fear and stupidity are a very powerful combination. And it’s a fear of change they’re reacting to, which apparently is even stronger than their fear of death. Covid19 is going to make for some permanent changes in us as a society and, in true conservative fashion, they have their fingers in their ears and are standing in the middle of the road yelling “STOP!”
Constance Reader
“I don’t know if it is the racism because these yokels in the south saw it hitting minority communities worse than other groups and said fuck it. I don’t know if it is just a fear of the base. I don’t know if they are just that fucking stupid. I don’t know if it is because they are greed pigs who only care about the stock market. I don’t know if they are just sociopaths who don’t care about other people.”
For the governors, it’s greed and racism. For their base, they are just that fucking stupid. I grew up in rural East Texas, I know these people, trust me. They really are just that fucking stupid.
Gin & Tonic
@Mai naem mobile: 19-year-old son of a friend died of it. Athletic middle-class white kid from the suburbs. 30-something friend of my daughter’s has been hospitalized for six weeks. A couple of days ago she posted a video where she managed to walk three steps with a cane. She was overjoyed.
The Moar You Know
@Ramiah Ariya: Agreed. Hubei province police welding the doors of non-compliants shut, with them inside, was “drastic action”.
Not sure if they ever let those folks out again, either.
JPL
@Gemina13: You might consider white rice also since it lasts forever. Trader Joe’s frozen brown rice is pretty good also. I’ve been trying to use up my current supply of chicken, but I plan on buying more next time I go to the store. I’m glad you mentioned bacon, cuz I’ll add that to the list.
hueyplong
@Doug R: I keep seeing these references to a need to lie about masks helping because of the initial shortage.
OK, let’s say there was a shortage, they needed to be reserved for medical personnel, etc., etc. Wouldn’t that make the proper lie be to tell people that they weren’t safe leaving the house at all? The lie they told just led to tons of infections when a different lie would not have.
Cole is right. The only thing to say is, “These fucking people” and just put a period on it
[My wife and I went on a vacation in early March that we would not have gone on had there been any truth telling. Luckily, we happened to own a box full of N95 masks and so we wore them at airports and on the flights because our son said we should be more paranoid than the announcements.]
John Revolta
Profane times demand profane measures, Cole.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
I wouldn’t give DeWimp too much credit there, Cole. He didn’t mandate masks in public because that might “offend” some people. Right now, we’re seeing spikes in cases that DeWimp himself is saying aren’t completely attributable to testing and hospitalizations are on the rise as well. We’ll see if he shuts things back down but I’m not hopeful. As bad as he is, the whackjobs in the legislature are worse. They and the protesters forced Acton out of her job
Cameron
I dunno. I lay the entire responsibility for this catastrophe on one person, Donald Trump. State responses were never going to cut it; it had to be a Federal response, and he is allegedly the chief executive. He was warned repeatedly from the time information became available, and he chose to watch TV and tweet and cry about how badly treated he was and to lie his ass off about what was going on. It all comes back to him. To the extent he did anything at all regarding the pandemic, it was to make things worse. Even the states with the best responses suffered needlessly. Did other people fall down on the job? Yes, they did – but it wouldn’t have mattered if he had done what he should have done, namely putting Fauci or Redfield or somebody with something besides oatmeal in their heads in charge, telling them he would go to Congress to get whatever they needed, and then getting the fuck out of their way.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Doug R:
I was referring to the trump administration refusing– and his supplicant governors being afraid– to call for mask-wearing in the states that are spiking and spreading now. Simple cloth masks that I see being offered for sale in just about every drycleaners the last week or so (just started to notice that)
Capri
I think these people acted the way they did because they have been brainwashed into believing that all the right-wing nonsense is true. If Fox and Rush and the rest say that COVID is a hoax that is no worse than the regular flu that is what they honestly believe. And if any so-called scientists say different, it’s just because they are liberals who hate America and Trump so they are using it as a way to bring the country to its knees.
The fact that COVID is still killing people was completely unexpected on their part.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@The Moar You Know:
I remember seeing the videos of that back in January and February and I thought I was witnessing the beginning of the end of civilization. I couldn’t help but wonder what it was that would make the Chinese shut down their entire economy and weld people into their homes
danielx
If I had a dime for every time I think “these fucking people…” during a day for the last three months, I could take the next six months off.
The Moar You Know
@Leto: Had to go pick some stuff up for the wife yesterday, and turns out it’s right next to the bike shop I used to work in.
They are letting in one person at a time, with masks and temperature taken, and you have to provide a valid California driver’s license and they take down that info for contact tracing. That’s new. Haven’t seen anyone here doing that yet and it damn well ought to be the norm.
And their attitude towards those who don’t want to do that because “muh constitution rights” was “good luck finding another bike shop, asshole, this is private fucking property”.
I am SO proud to have been a former employee of theirs.
trollhattan
WTF is going on with testing?
False positives, inconclusive retests, re-retests…how is anybody supposed to have definitive information if the processes and tools are this poor?
Aleta
@Mai naem mobile: I happened across that last night :
He Removed Labels That Said “Medical Use Prohibited,” Then Tried to Sell Thousands of Masks to Officials Who Distribute to Hospitals
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Gin & Tonic: My coworkers husband (fit, in shape, eats healthy) mid 40’s caught it in March and was in ICU for over a month and then rehab to learn to walk and dress and feed himself. My husbands coworker lost his wife (50 had underlying condition) and friend at work lost her mom-in -law (she lived in a nursing home…) Several of my coworkers has spouses who recovered but who all say you do NOT want to catch it…
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@The Moar You Know: Bravo! for your old employer, I wish every store did that! I have a friend who works retail and the utter disregard customers have (some of them anyway) is just astounding. And her mangers are too afraid if complaints to corporate to enforce the governors ACTUAL RULES. Arrrggghhh
bluehill
If these outbreaks end up helping Biden take TX, AZ and FL and reclaim the senate, I’ll certainly thank them for their sacrifice. It will not have been in vain. I thought that it would take something like another world war to unite country, but not the war I envisioned nor the unity that I had hoped for. Right now, I’ll settle for buried grievances rather than true enlightenment.
gene108
@Ramiah Ariya:
Found out from a cousin the municipal corporation has people going door-to-door to check on people.
There also stricter measures to have people, who test positive isolate away from others.
I think, if you test positive, you stay in a tent on your property, away from the rest of your household.
America just gave up trying to contain community spread, without much of a fight.
Brachiator
Don’t worry about it. You’re fine. I’ve felt exactly the same way.
I’m sure that some of these morons were going:
Of course, a portion of the nonwhite deaths were due to people working in areas where they were exposed to the virus. Now that lockdowns are ending, there is more infection and more illness due to community spread and decreased social distancing.
But it’s not just the US. In the UK, thousands of people have just said “fuck it” and are hitting the beach, ignoring social distance recommendations. They are seeing that the absolute number of fatalities is relatively small and thinking that their chances of catching the virus and passing it on are rare.
The Pale Scot
I see your problem right there. Good to see you’re still the cheery optimist.
Major Major Major Major
With slaves, probably. I really wish people would stop bringing this up as a point of comparison. We built perfectly cromulent field hospitals.
The Thin Black Duke
Sometimes I wonder how the human race managed to evolve in the first place.
Ramiah Ariya
@gene108: Yes, the door-to-door checks happened until a few weeks back. Now they do not seem to have the manpower. Most homes (like mine) are small, so it is impossible to isolate.
But yes, the govt is trying as hard as they can, and it was clear among the population from the beginning that you got to comply for your own sake. I think that is the feeling all over the world, and the few nutcases in the US are really getting too much exposure thanks to the King Wingnut.
piratedan
And as shitty as 45 is, i still look at that august chamber of bodies that watched his treasonous acts trotted out in front for their consideration and they did nothing. Nothing. And they still do nothing.
trollhattan
Can I please get a metric tonne of STFU delivered here, STAT? Stupid people will get the rest of us dead.
Will add that preemptive protests against a unicorn vaccine do indicate people with lots of time on their hands.
Joe Falco
Governor Shotgun in Georgia is a firm “No” on rolling back re-openings.
Everyday, this waste of space reminds me how much I wish Abrams had kicked his vote-suppressing white butt in 2018.
piratedan
@trollhattan: because there’s no entity stating definitively this is how it should be… you have 50 states all doing a variation of the theme.
gene108
@Doug R:
We got out of the mask shortage, in part, because someone figured out you do not need surgical grade masks to protect you on a trip to the store, so cloth masks will suffice.
The sewing, and crafting community really helped ramp up mask protection.
The failure on masks was not informing people that home sewn cloth masks can work, so people would not rush out to buy disposable masks used in hospitals.
Just total incompetence to not think of functional substitutes.
trollhattan
@Major Major Major Major:
One man’s slave is another man’s counterrevolutionary. Potato/potahto.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike in Pasadena: Sadly, you are correct.
Suzanne
OTOH, one of my healthcare clients released a statement saying that they are seeing their lowest number of severely ill patients since early Spring. So that’s good.
patroclus
That briefing was just pathetic. Pence’s “message” was that we’re doing so well in controlling the virus and that blatantly conflicts with all available data – all you have to do is compare how the EU has been doing to the U.S. to understand that. And Birx, Fauci and Redfield were not much better – refusing to cast the obvious blame on the Trump campaign, the idiotic Republican governors for opening up too early and the MAGAs for deliberately flouting public health guidance.
Our country’s abject failure to deal with this virus is outrageous!!
Soprano2
Not just you, I find myself using the word “fuck” as much as I did when I worked at a trucking company, and that was a lot. It took me 6 months to clean up my language after I left that place. I will say that right now we can operate our pub at 50%, and it’s rare that we have that many people. We probably have 25% or less most of the time. I keep telling people you can say to businesses “open up” all you want, but you can’t make people come out. I’d say our average customer is older, so I think they’re being more cautious, although I did have one guy say he wished we could move our bar one county south where they don’t have any restrictions. I’m just waiting for it to get bad here, and dreading that.
trollhattan
@piratedan:
The twist here is even if they’re in [cough] Florida the league and teams all signed on to a rigorous testing and quarantining protocol when agreeing to hold the tournament. Maybe the Orlando team relied on a bad system overseen by the State, I don’t know those details. But the other teams better hope they’re not arriving with any false negatives in their squads or personnel!
FWIW one positive test during the tournament and it’s probably cancelled.
catclub
Ignorant son of a spavined camel.
also, twatwaffle.
lee
The thing with Texas is that is it starting to hit the red suburbs. The red suburb I’m in stopped doing daily counts and told everyone to get the data from the state. Right now the data from the state is about 24 hours old. I’ve seen it as old as 48 hours.
The only way to get the count increase for each day for the county is to download the Excel spreadsheet and search. Thankfully the press is keeping up these numbers and publishing them.
They are also using antibody tests in their ‘total tests’ count (admittedly it is only about 10% of the total).
So Texas is not only screwing up the restrictions (and lack thereof) but also trying to keep people unaware of how bad it is actually getting (again thank the press for keeping up with it).
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Major Major Major Major:
Those “hospitals” were only meant to house infected people who needed little medical care, too. If they worsened, they got sent to a real hospital.
trollhattan
@patroclus:
Sterny McSternface will stare the gosh dang virus right back to North Korea, his ownself. Mother said.
joel hanes
@Gemina13:
my brain locks up tight when I witness the daily idiocies of the GOP
It turns out that adjectives and epithets are beside the point when baldly and accurately describing their actions is more insulting than than the cursing.
Trump deliberately dismantled and defunded the federal pandemic response team put in place by his predecessors.
Trump actively discouraged and hindered the development of adequate testing capability.
Pence actively muzzled the federal government’s infectious disease experts.
Trump carefully chose to use only part of the DPA in an effort to maximize the opportunities for profiteering by his allies, and thus grifting.
Trump deputized Jared to suborn FEMA and the FBI into tracking and seizing PPE/mask shipments ordered by hospitals and stage governments, for “redistribution” into gray-market channels that maximized opportunities for profiteering and grift. This left many healthcare facilities without adequate PPE, and resulted in the preventable deaths of many doctors, nurses, and patients.
Trump actively promoted a drug that has no detectable positive effect on COVID-19, and that has serious side effects.
I could go on.
Suzanne
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): THANK YOU. The Chinese Covid hospitals were essentially dorms. They did not construct facilities in which you could actually get acute or intensive medical care in two weeks.
joel hanes
@Gemina13:
we’re getting 50 lbs of salmon from the SO’s job in Alaska.
envy
lee
@gene108:
If I remember correctly there was some doubt at first on how effective simple cloth masks were going to be.
trollhattan
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
They renovated our abandoned hoops arena into a COVID ward for hospital overflow should those reach capacity (not yet). It’s pretty impressive–they brought in dividers and flex HVAC ducting for air management, along with the beds and such. It’s a nice resource to keep in reserve, with sincere hopes it’s never put to use.
At some point, Republicans will point and shout at it as an egregious example of Democrat tax-wasting.
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
Once again, Texas finds the most stupid man in the state, and makes him governor. Though this time it’s a tie between him and his “Let’s kill the olds for the economy” Lt. Gov.
I have a friend who decided to stay in San Antonio when the Army dropped her there. How do I sponsor her if she wants to get a visa and move to NYS?
Tazj
@Cameron: Yes, I feel the same way about Trump, it’s primarily his fault. He just had to change everything that Obama did and nothing could get in the way of “his” economy. What was one of the first things listed in the Obama administration’s pandemic playbook? It was to secure PPE for healthcare workers and they not only didn’t do that they made it harder for governors to get them for their state.
I’m not happy with those in the administration who have medical and scientific knowledge but didn’t insist on home made mask wearing for everyone sooner. Where they really afraid people would stop social distancing, taking masks for healthcare workers or using the masks wrong? I don’t know but in hindsight the decision was terrible.
joel hanes
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Santa Clara converted the convention center into a COVID-19 isolation hospital in which about non-ICU 220 patients could be accommodated. The conversion took about two weeks. In the event, the county successfully suppressed the first wave, and less than 20 patients ever went there, and it was dismantled.
I hope they stored the materiel somewhere handy, because Santa Clara County’s rate of new cases doubled in the last week. Re-opening seems to have been premature.
Marcopolo
Everyone make a toast, the House just passed a DC statehood bill!
Now it’s take the Senate and make it happen.
bluehill
@Boris Rasputin (the evil twin): Seems like people there are going to learn the difference between exponential growth and linear growth. I wonder if it will reach the tipping point where panic starts to set in.
As a generalization, it seems like many people are indifferent rather than trying to make a political statement. However, at some point, their self-preservation instinct is going to kick in and then things could get chaotic.
catclub
That is not true. They approve even more unqualified federal judges.
joel hanes
@joel hanes:
Hmm. I should have appended “and lied about it” to nearly every item in that list.
namekarB
Exactly. Elections have consequences, 120,000 dead and counting
Suzanne
@Tazj: The messaging on masks was ludicrous. First it was “masks don’t work so save them for healthcare workers!”, which is completely fucking ridiculous and does nothing but undermine trust in their fucking competency. FUCK.
I had some N95s because of my job and I saved them for myself and my family members when there wasn’t anything available. Now we just wear the cloth ones, but I always thought that guidance was prima facie dumb as shit.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Suzanne:
It was brilliant of the Chinese to do that, because isolating those patients in the COVID field hospitals if/until they worsened may have limited community spread somewhat. Home infections are very common
Major Major Major Major
@trollhattan:
Gonna assume sarcasm…
Ohio Mom
What Goku said at 33. DeWine started strong but could not keep up the act and reverted back to his native Republicanism.
Right now at my end of Ohio the numbers are surging upwards. I wish we would have another lockdown but nooo, we’re going ahead and opening up the tourist draw of King’s Island amusement park. Because we don’t have enough local vectors apparently.
LongHairedWeirdo
Honest to goodness, I don’t blame you. See, time was, the GOP would try to make actual arguments. They were *feeble*, mind you, but they did have a proposition, and information that nominally supports that proposition.
One thing that just *stuns* me is how they don’t even want, or need, *good* lies, lies that actually hold together now. They’ll just make blanket assertions that are so obviously, horrifyingly, wrong, you really *can’t* discuss them. In point of fact, they’re not even real arguments, so much as bad faith statements, daring people to say otherwise.
For my favorite example: Jared Kushner wanted a back channel to Russia, with no US oversight. Just little ol’ pastyface against Russian intelligence. This is completely indefensible. The only reason to reject US oversight is to do something wrong. But even if you assume he had only innocent motives (and you sure shouldn’t), the complete and utter stupidity of thinking you can walk into an embassy, and not get played six ways to Sunday should instantly disqualify him from getting a security clearance. How many Republicans have gone on the record to point this out? None! Just have the noise machine insist there’s nothing to see here.
How can you respond with a rational statement at that point? It is like the Monty Python dead parrot sketch, only in real life, with the fate of the nation at stake.
Jinchi
I think it was an honest error, conflating risk for people on the front lines with risk for the overall population. Cloth masks are not appropriate for medical settings, where you’re exposed to risk 24 hours a day. If you’re a doctor, a simple cloth mask is not going to protect you for long.
For the rest of us, the concern is incidental exposure. Crossing paths with a sick individual, not spending every day treating an entire ward of confirmed cases.
Major Major Major Major
@joel hanes: We turned the Javits Center into a field hospital. Unbelievable to see. We didn’t end up needing it, or the navy hospital ship, as much as we’d feared.
Bupalos
@Cameron: Redfield is absolutely horrible. Fauci should have had untouchable czar status. But there really are no meaningful “shoulds” here, the narcissist looter in chief made any success not attributable to blind lazy luck completely impossible.
Baud
@Jinchi: I also recall that there was a fear that cloth masks would discourage social distancing, and they wanted to emphasize social distancing. They were basically applying behavioral psychology, correctly or incorrectly.
Major Major Major Major
@Suzanne: Don’t forget “masks work, but only if you wear them right” (excepting that in studies the majority of healthcare workers don’t fit their N95s right). “Only N95s work” (excepting the many studies showing that surgical masks provide good protection against respiratory viruses). “Mask-wearing will cause people to risk compensate and run around rubbing their eyeballs on everything, so we should tell them these other lies” (unsurprisingly, mask use seems to lead to heightened awareness of risks).
Jeffro
@Major Major Major Major: I thought he was raising it as a sign that it was time to be alarmed, not that the Chinese were somehow better at building hospitals faster than us.
Ksmiami
@The Moar You Know: ive been reduced to I just want the GOP to die motherfucker die
Major Major Major Major
@Jeffro: By my reading it’s an example of how “Other civilized nations handled the crisis”, while “Republicans surrendered”.
joel hanes
@Jinchi:
it was an honest error, conflating risk for people on the front lines with risk for the overall population
IMHO, more important was the mistake about direction, about who is protected from whom.
Cloth masks help protect others from you.
Medical N95 masks mostly protect you from others.
The first is a harder sell, especially in America, because it depends to some extent on altruism to solve a collective action problem. The motivations for the second can be purely selfish.
Early on, I saw an interview with a very senior epidemiologist, which included two statements that have stuck with me:
“Each of us should behave as if we knew we were already infected, and are trying to avoid infecting others”
“In a pandemic, over-reaction is the correct reaction”
Gravenstone
@Ohio Mom:
Wait, what?!?! Imagine Cedar Point is following suit. Spread the love north AND south. That is beyond reckless and stupid. Of course Disney was talking about doing similar with their parks, before reality slowed their roll for now.
WaterGirl
Wow, the State of Illinois announced in-person school this fall. I know there are reasons, but I think that is not going to turn out well from a public health standpoint.
Hoodie
It usually doesn’t have to be this way, but it invariably is. As a colleague use to ask, “are we an organization or just a bunch of people fucking around?” I’d say the US is the latter. There is no “we” to the US.
joel hanes
@Major Major Major Major:
As I understand it, no one who understood infectious diseases thought that the hospital ship was an actual solution to anything but a public-relations problem.
Ocotillo
My company asked me yesterday if I was ok going to a convention in Ozark’s beloved Missouri. I agreed but then I gave it some thought and was like, no, that is the exact environment that breeds the COVID.
Anyway, the other person who is supposed to go phoned me to let me know I need to make my hotel reservation quickly. The convention is on Lake of the Ozarks and the hotel had told her ever since the big party that had the clip that went viral made news, they have been overwhelmed with people traveling there.
I did back out and declined to attend but holy sh*t.
Gravenstone
@Baud:
Urgh, just ran across a meme to that very end. “If the masks work, why do we need social distancing? If social distancing works, why do we need the masks?”
Sweet meteor of death, where are you?
The Pale Scot
@The Thin Black Duke:
Many people do say that leaving the trees was a big mistake
joel hanes
@WaterGirl:
Illinois has been doing really well.
Their Rt is 0.84, and has been below 1.0 for many weeks.
California, where I live, unfortunately returned to > 1.0 after a one-month dip, and is currently estimated at 1.09
By this measure, a bunch of the low-population states are looking really really bad, with Rt > 1.3
The Thin Black Duke
@Gravenstone: Why wish for the meteor? COVID-19 is doing just fine on its own.
joel hanes
@The Pale Scot:
Douglas Adams saw what you did there.
narya
I agree completely and totally about the amazing amount of idiocy (and grift–never forget the grift) that is covering this whole nougaty cluster of fk. Here in IL I remain exceedingly grateful for a governor and mayor who jumped on this early and often. It seems to have resulted in more (but NOT universal) common sense. I see masks on folks when I go for my runs. I haven’t been to a store in weeks, so can’t speak to that, but when I go pick up beer this weekend, I fully expect to see folks in masks even for the curbside pickup. I also hear, from friends, that idiots are crowding restaurants, and I can only hope that the aggressive testing and precipitous drop in cases will help protect them. The health center at which I work is going to be teaching other health centers how to do contact tracing–funded by the city/state.
But I’m still anxious. There is so much needless illness and death everywhere, and a political party that is determined to ignore it
ETA: aaaand now I see the comment about the schools. Lordy. I don’t take it ALL back, but that’s a problem.
LongHairedWeirdo
@lee: It’s a complicated story, and some of the issues may be 20/20 hindsight.
Since you can get it through your eyes, a mask isn’t perfect protection. (And, in fact, a Covid-19 researcher is sure he was infected that way, on an airplane trip.)
Okay, *BUT*, even in the early days, they were saying “it’s safe to socialize, just stay 6+ feet apart”. That strongly suggested droplet transmission.
Some folks are saying the primary reason for the “don’t bother with masks” advice was the fear of shortages. But I’d also seen articles saying that they didn’t seem sufficient, and that combination makes for reasonable advice: “you won’t have a face shield or goggles, so don’t take a mask from a health care provider”.
Or, it might well be that no one thought plain cloth would help *anyone* – and they *did* recommend masks for sick people. Under the maxim of “first, do no harm” they’d want to be sure that plain cloth doesn’t hurt, and there are circumstances in which it *might*. For example, if your mask gets splashed with water, it won’t block droplet transmission until it dries; brownian motion (I *believe* that’s what it is) will have viruses move randomly through the water, and if any touch your lips or tongue, that could be enough to infect you.
(So always keep a spare mask, unless you’re brave enough to do without until you get home.)
I don’t know the state of the science at the time, but at the very least, I’ll grant that it was bad luck that “don’t mask” was one of the first things they said. I’m not sure it was stupid/wrong, but at the absolute least, it was incredibly bad luck that the consensus turned that way.
@bluehill: Technically, you can make the same claim for exponential growth versus polynomial growth – eventually, exponential growth will *always* win. Exponential functions are essentially infinite-degree polynomials.
But you’re right – failing to understand that the growth of an outbreak is expected to be exponential, until you’ve gotten ahead of the test, track, isolate curve, leads to people thinking they have a lot more time than they do. If your hospitals are at 75% of capacity, can cases are growing at 9-10% a day, it might be too late to keep them from overflowing.
I suspect that “capacity at 50% and first derivative is positive” is when you have to start fighting back, to avoid being overwhelmed.
James E Powell
It definitely did not have to be this way, but with our culture, with our political system, with Republicans being in charge of the federal government, with the most incompetent and corrupt president in our history, and with a press/media that treats each crisis like a new mini-series, it was inevitable.
Consider where we would be right now if no one had videoed the murder of George Floyd.
A Ghost to Most
Conserve your strength, JC. This shit fight just getting started.
The Rs have been building towards this moment for 40 years. I don’t see them backing down now. YMMV.
cain
@Ramiah Ariya:
Hell the police can even beat you up. Which is some crazy authoritarian stuff.
My family are in Mumbai and they haven’t stepped out in months and same situation, you can get in trouble with the cops if you are out and about.
With 2 billion people, teh death toll would be immeasurable if they did not make it absolutely necessary. More so, there would not countenance anything that would harm public health.
Major Major Major Major
@LongHairedWeirdo:
I can’t help but notice that an entire continent, home to billions of people, did not seem to trip over this. Why didn’t we pay attention to what they did?
Chief Oshkosh
@gene108:
Total incompetence and total lack of leadership. Very early on there were loads of articles and bits of information on the web talking about how cloth masks are a good substitute. Some web bits included links to peer-reviewed journal articles that showed, going way back, that cloth masks do about 50% of what an N95 will do, and about 85% of what a disposable surgical mask will do. A lot of these substitutes did not require sewing. We could have EASILY geared up for a making lots of masks at home. It could have been a unifying activity. But since the fucking moron in the WH thrives on chaos and disunity, we are where we are.
Fuck every single goddamned Republican Senator. If the second half of the first wave goes badly, they may need to be hosed down with C19 and left in a locked room for three weeks.
joel hanes
@LongHairedWeirdo:
second and third derivatives positive are big flashing red warning lights
that’s where some states are now
Martin
@gene108: Sort of. The failure I see was the refusal to have a national messaging strategy. I think you could have told the public to not buy N95 because hospital workers need the, but you can use these substitutes, but you couldn’t get that message out in the 9 seconds when Trump wasn’t whining about the Chinese. So it got truncated to ‘don’t bother with masks’ because that had better outcomes than every doctor and nurse in America dying in the span of a month.
And yes, the alternative mask community ramped up, but holy shit is it still fucked up. Ms Martin is on her 3rd mask group. The first two picked a cause, and then disbanded when that cause was met. According to her count, they’re about to distribute their 10,000th mask, and all of these have been to public agencies. Yes, the state is doing a good job with the hospitals, but not with the county jails and the small clinics and so on, and that’s what her group is serving.
And I know from my work that the CDC is not a resource – Trump buttoned them up so that they could be a happy news factory, which meant that they had no information to help us. My work keeps telling me ‘that’s not for us, that’s for the organizational tier above us’ and I challenge them to show me they’re working on it, and they’re not, because they’re assuming the tier above them is doing, right up to the feds who are doing jack shit.
This is primarily a bottom up effort, which is fucking terrifying. CA is doing a good job, but my county really isn’t. The county public health office was doing well, and then the assholes pushed their leadership out due to death threats, and then things went to shit fast. So I can’t count on my county for help now.
Had we led from the top, yes, we’d have holdouts and problems, but far, far fewer of them. The feds could have filled in the gaps with the states allowing the states to fill in the gaps with the counties. That’s all happening. OC dropped their mask requirement and the governor instituted a state-wide one. But it’s at best a slow process to work this way, and a massively inefficient one when the leadership has turned it into a culture war.
LongHairedWeirdo
@joel hanes: There’s some good evidence that cloth masks protect you, to some degree. The studies I’ve seen tended to show “mask on the infected reduces infections by 80 (or maybe a bit more) percent; mask on the uninfected reduces infections by 60 percent.”
A 40% chance of catching a possibly-deadly disease is bad; but it’s a hell of a lot better than “it would have been 90+% without the mask”, both from a personal, and public, health standpoint.
joel hanes
@Chief Oshkosh:
Very early on there were loads of articles and bits of information on the web talking about how cloth masks are a good substitute. Some web bits included links to peer-reviewed journal articles that showed, going way back, that cloth masks do about 50% of what an N95 will do, and about 85% of what a disposable surgical mask will do.
I too remember the First Age.
cain
@Mike in Pasadena:
Unfortunately, it has to be this way because without a hard lesson of where one cannot escape reality no matter how much kooky shit one reads on social media is what is going to be required and unfortunately, we are all susceptible to undisciplined and the feeling of privilege.
joel hanes
@LongHairedWeirdo:
There’s some good evidence that cloth masks protect you, to some degree.
Yes, I agree. Maybe 20 to 20% reduction in small droplets just from two layers of cotton; more with more layers, or with a layer of close-woven synthetic, or with a filter insert from a coffee filter or vacuum cleaner bag.
But I’m seeing too many people whom masking of any kind has made grossly over-confident, hanging out in close groups indoors (“but we wore masks!”) A 50 or 60 % reduction is not immunity.
greenergood
Late to the thread, but we got this the other day – because Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon wants to extent the lockdown in Scotland for a couple more weeks because we’re doing a lot better than England, which is ‘officially’ opening up on 4 July, even though the beaches and beer gardens have been SWAMPED due to unusually hot weather – so – waiting for the second wave, or the second bit of the first wave – but Nicola’s been adamant and the whole British press says she’s horrible, while the polls (England AND Scotland) say she’s right – sheesh: https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/outrage-after-banner-comparing-nicola-18482087
Calouste
Unilever just dropped all US advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for the rest of the year. That’s a Big Biden Deal, Facebook stock is down 7% today.
O. Felix Culpa
@lee: They only needed to look to Asia, especially Hong Kong, to learn how effective non-medical masks are in preventing disease transmission. That’s how they handled SARS back in the day and that’s why Hong Kong has a total of about 1100 cases and SEVEN coronavirus deaths so far, in one of the most congested cities in the world. Due to mask compliance. Only them that wants to see will see.
Ruckus
@WereBear:
They believe they are the most competent. They believe that everything they do is the best. The are imitating their leader, shitforbrains. Why and how would they, from their point of view, ask for better if they are the best? How would they understand that the almighty dollar is not smarter than they are, because a concept of payment actually is smarter than they are. Their world is dollars and hate, and they have to steal the dollars because they are so infected with racism and incompetence they can’t actually earn them. And in their world they are the smartest so they shouldn’t have to work and they don’t.
shitforbrains is as much symptom as he is their god, which is someone who has no skills and still lives like a wealthy git. Their goal is not to be better, it is to gain more wealth by doing nothing and hating anyone who might get in their way. Also they want slavery so they they can own one thing that actually can produce money. This is american exceptionalism at it’s worst.
RepubAnon
@chrisanthemama: Great tool! My favorite Shakespeare insult is: “Oh, cancerous excretion of thy mother’s womb!”
Major Major Major Major
@joel hanes:
Japan’s approach has been interesting. They closed down karaoke bars and other places with ties to superspreading events, but kept most things open. They already had a strong mask culture, so getting everybody to wear them wasn’t a problem. And they already had a cultural taboo about things like talking on the train.
Masks work, even in train cars so famously crowded they have to hire people to shove you inside.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Major Major Major Major: What I’d heard – on the internet, so grains of salt are appropriate! – was that a lot of people in the more successful countries masked for any cough. It was just What You Did, if you lived there.
It’s complicated, and one of the things that bugs me is that the Republicans are flailing around to find some way to shift the blame from Trump – like, “Nancy Pelosi said it was okay to come to Chinatown!
And since SHE is the PRESIDENT, whose JOB it is to be aware of threats to America, it’s HER fault that Trump didn’t have warning.”So I’m trying not to be too damning about the advice of professional healthcare experts. (On the plus side, since Republicans are dissing masks, it makes it far less likely that they’ll try to make “they said not to mask! It’s not Trump’s fault!” the scapegoat.)
bluehill
@Calouste: I wonder how much influence Peter Thiel, who’s on FB’s board, has on Zuck. Thiel was an early Silicon Valley backer of Trump and from the little I’ve read about his worldview seems to believe that the U.S. is due for some kind of mini-apocalypse.
James E Powell
@joel hanes:
Can you explain to the untrained what that means?
LuciaMia
Theyre just following Trumps lead. Never admit you fucked up/made a mistake. Then when Reality cant be denied , even for them, reluctantly step back, in the least useful way. When things really go tits-up, blame everything and everybody else.
Gin & Tonic
@Calouste: That’s real news. Unilever is big.
bluehill
@LongHairedWeirdo: I could if it had that level of knowledge!
germy
Ruckus
@The Moar You Know:
I told someone at work the other day that my swearing dictionary is getting a major workout. I’m not sure I’ve sworn this much since I was in the navy. And this is far worse than any day in the navy.
LuciaMia
As Cuomo would always reply to a reporter’s comments that ‘how quarantine is bad, economic slo-down is bad’, ‘so is death.’
James E Powell
@bluehill:
Zuckerberg started out with a website that ranked female student’s ID photos for “hotness” – he now says it was a prank website. But prank or not, how often does a person who does things like that turn out to be a good person when they get older?
What kind of person has a net worth of over $80 billion and continues to amass wealth and power?
OGLiberal
@Brachiator: RE: fatalities are relatively small. I saw more than a few experts voice concern early on that social distancing will definitely keep fatalities lower but that if it does as expected, people will ask “why did we have to social distance if deaths are so low?”, and not realize that this was the fucking point of social distancing and that maybe we shouldn’t rush back to not social distancing.
Of course, if you point that out to the folks who just can’t wait to go out and breathe on people, they will scream, “But Sweden! The experts said 2 million will die in the US and it’s much less than that! It’s mostly nursing homes! These people were going to die anyway! Why don’t we do this for the flu! If you’re scared, stay home but I’m not going to! If you take NY and NJ out of the statistics, not that many people died!”
To paraphrase Cole, “these fucking idiots.”
Ruckus
@Major Major Major Major:
Two words.
American.
Exceptionalism.
The concept that we are so much better than the rest of the world that we never, ever have to do what they do and if they don’t like it, we will send our young over, armed and camouflaged to show them exactly how to do it.
bluehill
@James E Powell: I hear you. Intelligence, arrogance and greed is not a good way for everyone else to go through life.
jl
Tragic that it didn’t have to be this way. Too many states in the US are blundering and causing much more of both social and economic and health damage than is necessary. Not all unknowns and surprises of this disease are horrendously bad. One is that the epidemic seems to bubble and percolate longer than expected before moving into exponential expansion stage. I read about one German epidemiologist who was criticized for including that factor in his prediction models, because he included it as an stable fudge factor, that he unfortunately, I think, decided to call it the ‘dark matter’ factor in progression from initial small outbreaks to a big epidemic wave. But seems like that approach is useful for designing control policies in Germany. Gives better idea of time scale needed to jump on outbreaks of different sizes, and resources needed.
So, states won’t enact cheap and simple things like wearing masks. Won’t invest enough in early surveillance and standard outbreak control methods. Then sit there like a someone sitting in the middle of the road watching a bus roar towards them. Then they have a crashed medical care system and have to shut down their precious bars and nightclubs anyway.
And ever growing number of countries demonstrating that an economy can reopen and not suffer a tragic wave of disease. For some reason US media insists on reporting from a perspective of learned helplessness and portraying outbreaks in other countries as showing how horribly difficult it is to reopen, and ‘everything has to change’ and blah blah. But other countries have been able to control those outbreaks, and since they are doing an order or more better than we are, their supposedly horrible outbreaks are mere, almost unnoticeable blips, compared to our mess.
Gretchen
My daughter was supposed to have a big wedding on July 4. That was cancelled, and replaced with a small, immediate family only one in her in-law’s back yard. Ohio and Kansas were both doing pretty well, so I have been planning to go. The news yesterday makes me wonder if that’s stupid. I’m devastated at the thought of missing my daughter’s wedding because stupid people had to be stupid. We could have at least gotten this enough under control that 10 people could safely travel to meet in a back yard. Sick.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@germy:
God, fuck Elon Musk. Sure hope his plans to move operations for Tesla to Texas get fucked over
Gin & Tonic
@germy: It is difficult to make predictions. Especially about the future.
Ruckus
@joel hanes:
That should be on every billboard in the country.
Right above,
FUCK TRUMP
LongHairedWeirdo
@James E Powell: In math, the “derivative” of a function describes how fast it’s growing. If you have a function for “distance traveled” then the derivative would be your speed – the faster you’re moving, the faster your “distance traveled” value changes, you see?
The second derivative is then the acceleration. It’s how fast the speed (the first derivative) is changing. There are more terms for further derivatives, which is a joy for me to know, but not joyful enough that I memorized any of them :-).
If a derivative value is positive, it means a function is increasing; if it’s 0, it’s staying the same; if it’s negative, the function is decreasing.
So, if you look at the function for “how many current cases?”, if the derivative is positive, it means you expect more cases tomorrow, because the function is increasing.
If the second derivative is also positive, it means that not only are case counts increasing, but the rate at which case counts are increasing is increasing. So not only do you expect more cases tomorrow, you also expect a higher growth in case count tomorrow. If the third derivative is also positive, then:
case counts are growing;
the amount they’re growing is increasing, and
the rate of the increase in growth is *also* increasing.
Equivalently, if you were driving, and accelerating at an ever faster rate,
The distance you travel will increase;
You’re accelerating (first derivative), and
you’re accelerating faster now, than you were previously (second derivative), and finally,
the rate of increase in acceleration is *also* increasing (third derivative).
Derivatives are why exponents will always overwhelm any polynomial; exponential growth means growth is occurring; and growing faster; and the rate of growing faster is growing; and the rate of “the rate of growing faster” is growing, etc.
Polynomials can only have a finite number of positive derivatives; exponential growth functions have an infinite number of positive derivatives.
CarolDuhart2
@Gravenstone: But once again, you can open, but you can’t make people go. I bet after one outbreak traced there, it will close back again. All because the powers that be can’t admit that we are nowhere close to a vaccine, cure, or effective treatment.
Once again, I blame male leadership. Closing down to these guys is like backing down. Think of the rhetoric around masks. But the PTSD of getting ill from your favorite amusement park means that you will never go back, even if/when there’s an all clear. Multiply it by x number of people, and it’s a loss that no amount of macho can cover up for. The virus has won.
trollhattan
@Gin & Tonic:
Heard this a.m. that one of the big wireless companies has done the same. “Buck Zuck”
Calouste
@Gin & Tonic: Yep. Keep in mind that Unilever spends so much on advertising that when they call Facebook and say “I want to talk to someone”, they get to talk to someone really high up. And apparently that conversation they had didn’t go well. Other advertisers were going to put Facebook spending on hold for the month of July, hoping for improvements on Facebook’s side, but Unilever clearly has drawn the conclusion that there won’t be significant improvements.
Gin & Tonic
@trollhattan: Yup, VZ.
jl
As an example of ridiculous outbreaks control policies, I read that Maricopa County had what they called a ‘voluntary’ contact tracking and isolation policy. Identified cases were counseled to get in touch with the people they thought they might have infected and warn them, and the case was closed.
Let’s see how things go in SF Bay Area. Some counties have their programs running well enough that they get a list of named contacts to check out in over 85 percent of the cases. And from data base of cases, looks like 30 to 40 percent of cases are now ID’d from contract tracking policies. That last bit is not quite good enough and has to get better, from research I’ve read, but it is progress. More counties provide living spaces and support for the two week isolation for those who need it. Wish us luck.
One problem is the horrendous lack of public sector competence in the US after years of attack, loss of funding, and general contempt from our oligarch rulers who wanted to siphon off the cash. Huge outbreak in San Quentin prison, now over 500 cases. That happened after state health department warned them to be careful with prisoner transfers and gave them a protocol, which corrections did not follow. But, our society decided years ago that criminals were trash, and no reason to treat them as humans, or think at all about the impact of our criminal justice system on society, and we tolerated a ‘who gives a damn’ attitude. But now that doesn’t work. One problem the US has is too many social problems that we’ve ignored for too long, and they are too close together for epidemic control.
mad citizen
@patroclus: Don’t believe what you are seeing! The MSM!
I continue to console myself that Big Brother arrived as an incompetent old con man and his idiot sidekick, and not a duo younger with more energy and brainpower.
James E Powell
@Gretchen:
My niece was scheduled to be married on May 30th. It’s now set for July 17th in a friend of the family’s backyard. We’re in the southwest corner of Riverside County, California. Trump Country.
I’m worried that even that is not a good idea.
Calouste
@trollhattan: Verizon, but they were only pulling out for a month. Just read that Honda is gone as well, spend $1.1 million on Facebook ads last month apparently.
joel hanes
@James E Powell:
The first derivative is the rate of increase. For a straight line ramp, like a freeway grade, it’s a constant — for freeways, a constant first derivative of 0.03, a three-percent grade, is a pretty good hill.
The second derivative is the rate of increase in the first derivative. For a straight line ramp, like a freeway grade (a constant first derivative), it’s zero. When you get near the top and the grade eases, it goes negative.
The third derivative is the rate of increase in the second derivative. For our ramp, it’s also zero, because the second derivative is a constant. And so on.
The thing about exponential increase is that all the derivatives, all the way out to infinity, are positive. Not only is the steepness of the grade increasing, the rate at which the steepness of the grade is increasing, and the rate at which the rate at which the steepness of the grade is increasing, and so on ad infinitum. It just keeps getting worse faster and faster.
It’s never quite a perfect vertical (in a road, a wall; in infection, everyone is simultaneously and instantly infected), but as time goes on, exponential increase becomes closer and closer to vertical. In infection, one starts to run out of uninfected persons, which produces the “logistic curve” of herd immunity.
The Pale Scot
@Gretchen:
Don’t fly there, please
frosty
@Leto: covidexitstrategy.org had PA as red for the first time since I’ve been following it. We were doing well, the only flaw putting us into yellow was a lack of testing. Now the 14-day average is increasing not decreasing and the positive % is flat instead if decreasing.
WASF
James E Powell
@LongHairedWeirdo:
@joel hanes:
Thank you both. I have seen & heard those terms a lot during this nightmare within another nightmare, but never understood them.
You explained it with brevity, clarity, and grace.
Do you think a 65 year old can learn calculus?
Kay
@WaterGirl:
There is risk but there’s also risk and damage to keeping them out of school. I think Illinois made a good decision (along with Massachusetts and Connecticut). These kids are really going to be set back staying out of school. They need to go back.
20% of our high schoolers here stopped participating completely in online classes. They dropped off the face of the earth. I can almost guarantee they were the most “at risk” kids going into this. We could profoundly harm millions of kids.
Other countries are managing to get their kids back into school. Can we do this one thing right? Of all the people involved in this disaster kids are the LEAST responsible for it, yet they’ll suffer all the lasting damage.
Kay
Brachiator
@James E Powell:
Zoom weddings. Is that a thing yet?
JPL
Seems like the Russians have been paying Afghanis to kill our soldiers and trump has known for months and has done nada..
Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/politics/russia-afghanistan-bounties.html
jl
@James E Powell: I have to wonder how much of trouble in SoCal is from big outbreaks in agricultural work crews and large workplaces. It’s not like those outbreaks can be sealed off from th rest of society. Two and a half percent of Imperial County population have had the bug, one and a half percent in Kings County. Not all of it certainly, but like prisons, has been just too much social decay in the country in too many sectors, and the epidemic runs them straight into each other
Edit: to put in perspective, Kings and Imperial Counties hit about as hard as greater NYC area and northern NJ.
joel hanes
@Kay:
These kids are really going to be set back staying out of school. They need to go back.
IMHO, we’re just starting to learn that there are many things that we need that we will not be able provide, because there is no way to provide them.
DropKicker1
@Major Major Major Major: Hospitals are easy-peasy. Real Men build walls, preferably big, beautiful walls. China took a couple of 100 years to build their great wall; Donlad’s building a Greater Wall, and in jiffy-presto time!
Jesus, I hope Canada’s smart enough to keep the border closed. You B-Juicers seem nice, but the scariest thing I can think of is a bunch of USA’ers heading north for fun and relaxation!
Mike
JPL
@Gretchen: How many hours away? You might ask your daughter whether her fiance’s family isolates themselves. A can’t imagine having to use zoom for a wedding, but if you want to see future anniversaries, it might be necessary. I’m so sorry.
jl
@Kay: Depends on how you open them. Greece and Switzerland started opening their schools almost two months ago, and continue to outperform US by an order of magnitude. I read that Australia managed to keep schools open throughout most of its initial crisis. But, as I noted in a previous thread a few days ago, they did very detailed studies of how outbreaks worked in their setting, and had the resources to design an effective response. In CA I’ve heard too many interviews with school officials worrying about how things will go if kids are crammed into overcrowded rooms again with inadequate protection for staff. Well, I figure, no need to worry about how it will turn out, it will turn out badly.
I’ve heard more talk about blended in-person and distance instruction designed to fit into ever shrinking resource availability. Hope that works.
joel hanes
@James E Powell:
Do you think a 65 year old can learn calculus?
If you remember your algebra, differential calculus (the first course) is within your grasp. You might have to brush up on trigonometry.
Integral calculus (the second course, in which you learn to “undo” what you learned to do in differential calculus) is more challenging.
jl
@joel hanes: Go to WHO European Observatory on Health Systems and read how other countries are learning how to provide them. But you need to plan your work and work your plan and devote sufficient resources. I fear that work is beyond capacity of US society in its current state. You can check how the countries are doing in the covid-19 section of Our World in Data.
Kay
@joel hanes:
We do the best we can. But we open. Unless you’re willing to completely write off 10 million children (out of 50 million), children who are mostly low income and barely had a shot anyway. You’re guaranteeing they won’t succeed if schools remain closed. That would be a tragedy.
Schools are essential. For children’s well being they are as essential as health care.
Hoodie
@Kay: That’s all true, but I have zero confidence that most school systems, especially those with a lot of underprivileged kids, will be able to effectively prevent rapid spread in schools. Here in our county, there’s talk of limiting the number of kids in each classroom to 18. That’s probably too many, but I can’t see how they’ll even be able to do that unless a bunch of affluent families keep their kids at home and home school. Where are they going to get the extra teachers, and how are they going to pay them? Because of anti-tax shitbags, they normally don’t even have enough money for textbooks or to properly clean the schools.
WaterGirl
@joel hanes: I agree that we’ve been doing well. But we’ve been doing well because of what we’ve been doing. It seems to me that this is the jumping off the cliff stage, and I think it will set us back greatly.
I will be thrilled if I am wrong.
joel hanes
@James E Powell:
If you don’t really remember your algebra or trig, you can get a useful grasp of the concepts from works such as Gonick’s Cartoon Guide To Calculus
jl
@WaterGirl: Way I figure it, either the prevalence is low enough for the outbreak control system to work well, or it isn’t. If you have both, you can muddle through. If not, you are NYC, TX, AZ, FL, just a matter how long you have to wait.
Check out the sites I gave above and read about how more successful countries are managing in Europe.
Kay
@jl:
Biden probably gets lots of advice but if I were him I would give a speech with a plan to 1. open schools and 2. open daycares.
Parents are frantic. He’ll get every voter with children in this county if he even acknowleges that this is an emergency and a priority. We’re really going to sacrifice these kids?
joel hanes
@Kay:
I’m sorry to have to disagree. COVID-19 will kill a few kids, and seriously injure more. Infection will kill or injure a bunch of their teachers. Infection will kill or injure a bunch of their parents and grandparents. Death is worse than the loss of education and socialization.
Ultimately, I think we’ll have to give an entire cohort of students four years to complete the work they would have done in 2020-2021. Many of them never will. This is an enormous loss for them and for all of us, but IMHO it’s been baked-in since the end of April — we’ve just been in denial.
Israel opened their schools over a month ago now. Within a few weeks, they were forced to re-close over a hundred of those schools because of outbreaks.
I hope I am wrong about all of this.
Chetan Murthy
John,
This. Yeah: I find myself feeling this way about some people’s response to the ‘rona. And also about their response to racism. A (longtime, one of my oldest) friend sent me a link to a YT vid of some asslicker former po-po who hangs with Candice Owens and claims that black people in America aren’t oppressed and shit. I got about 15sec into the video before I stopped it and sent him a series of emails which contained profanity and anger and and and and and ……
I don’t have any time or patience to deal with people who cant’ see the hand in front of their face, the fist punching again and again and again. I just don’t.
Mike in NC
How long before our rancid media starts pushing Greg Abbott as a prospective GOP presidential candidate?
We ventured out briefly today because the wife wanted to shop for some new clothes. Appears that almost all the department stores have made dressing rooms off limits until further notice, so people can’t try things on. Makes perfect sense from a public health standpoint, but it has got to have a negative affect on the economy, just as having a shortage of workers has hit many places that normally depend on summer tourism that’s greatly reduced.
Ohio Mom
Gretchen: I’d say it depends exactly which part of Ohio or Kansas (I don’t know which one is your destination) you are headed to. I think there are some fairly quiet parts of Ohio, though of course things can change quickly.
Or as someone else suggested, Zoom? It’s not the same but better than nothing.
My oldest BFF and her husband have yet to meet their first grandchild, who lives in a different state and is now almost three months old.
My sister and BIL are expecting their first grandchild within the next two weeks and have no hopes of being able to meet him/her for a long, long time (my niece has a teaching job overseas).
It isn’t the biggest thing about COVID obviously but it is sad how much joy it’s stealing from families who only want the simple pleasure of creating shared memories.
Kay
@joel hanes:
Well, I disagree and I’m going to fight it. The idea that they have to give up an education in order to keep their grandparents safe is reprehensible to me, and I’m a grandparent. This is about them. What THEY need. We talk about what adults need in this country plenty. It’s time for someone to pay attention to them. If we have the money to put helicopters in the air to spy on protestors we can afford to provide them with a public education. They cannot be sacrificed because their parents and grandparents are too fucking greedy and selfish to cast a reasonably well-informed VOTE.
Let’s try to avoid making this a generational disaster.
OGLiberal
@jl: We homeschool so have no personal stake but I can’t see public schools having the resources and $$$ to do what they need to do to open up safely. You know they won’t be getting anything from Trump or Mitch and state and local governments are getting hit hard. Even if they weren’t, just about everywhere I have lived in my life there were/are a large number of people yelling, “Why do my taxes have to go up to pay for the school budget?…I don’t even have kids in school. Plus, overpaid administrators, teachers unions suck, they get the summer off…argle bargle!!!”
zzyzx
Thank you for mentioning that! I was reading one piece that was explaining the danger of exponential growth but their example had a 4 day doubling rate and 60% of the town being exposed without that doubling rate ever slowing. I was wondering how 120% of the community was going to be infected.
As a math person, that irked me.
p.a.
Has anyone with a platform used the word murder? “Donald Trump and his admin is committing mass murder of their own citizens by callousness, incompetence [fill in any negative adjective here]…”
Would just love to hear the Washington cocktail glasses shatter as the reaction to such ‘incivility’.
WaterGirl
@Gretchen: What a heartbreaking choice to have to make. I’m so sorry.
WereBear
@James E Powell: I’ve been told that learning statistics is a better place to start.
joel hanes
@Kay:
My opinions, which are worth approximately what you pay for them, don’t make any difference at all.
What I think will happen: for all the reasons you cite, and more reasons besides, we will re-open schools. It will go very badly very quickly, and the pandemic will once again spin out of control in places in which it was suppressed, and devastate exactly the underprivileged families for whose kids you are so rightly concerned. Administrations will thrash policies, but because of the three-week lead time, it will already be too late by the time the problem becomes obvious. Schools will open, re-close, re-open, fail. We’ll lose many teachers. Parents who are now frantic to send their kids back to school will be frantic in the other direction when one of their own kid’s classmates hits the ICU, or loses a limb, or dies. School districts will spend their entire budgets in a few months, or will be utterly unable to comply with the practices that would keep kids healthy. About half of our colleges, maybe more, will fail outright, unless an incoming Biden administration allocates many billions in subsidies.
Marigold
@Ohio Mom: I’m so sorry. Our numbers up north have been pretty stable, but the growing tourist traffic scares me.
@Gravenstone: Yes, Cedar Point is scheduled to open July 9, Kalahari and Great Wolf Lodge are already open. The parking lots aren’t as full as they would have been last summer, but they’re still half full.
James E Powell
@Kay:
In my classes it was the reverse. Only 20% showed up for online zoom classes, about 10% more did the online assignments. My colleagues at my school and a few in other districts reported about the same. Nobody I talked with got more than 50%. It may because the school districts announced that no one’s grade would go down and no one would get an F. I’m sure some had issues with internet access, but we do not have good information on that.
Give how much public education is a product of constitutions, statutes, and administrative codes – special education even more so – I think we are headed for the land of confusion.
joel hanes
@Kay:
COVID-19 does not just kill old people.
Many of the younger people (parents, e.g.) who get it and “recover” have serious long-term health consequences. Some of them die. A few of them lose limbs to clotting. Many of them may have permanent lung damage, kidney damage, brain damage, cognitive deficits. We are just beginning to learn about this aspect of the coronavirus, and the picture is very ugly.
Kay
@joel hanes:
The actual risk to children is small. It is. The risk to them of staying out of school is not small. It is a virtual guarantee of lasting harm.
Meat packing plants are essential but schools are not? I think that’s nuts. I also can’t help but notice we deemed the ONE public program we grant to children “too difficult to do”.
It has to be done. We should start figuring out how we’re going to do it.
OGLiberal
@Marigold: “Kalahari and Great Wolf Lodge are already open”
If the experts are correct and outside activity is better and safer, why the eff would anybody go to an indoor waterpark where the air is basically a mist of poorly circulated liquid particles 100% of the time. It’s not exactly cold outside. Are they socially distancing on the lines for the slides?
FWIW, Kalahari and Great Wolf Lodge up here in the Poconos have opened as well.
Ohio Mom
Re: public schools. One of the rare silver linings of the pandemic could be that we finally chuck those awful annual standardized tests.
It was ridiculous before to assume everyone learned and developed lockstep, and to penalize schools for any deviation from the abritrary benchmarks established by the tests.
Now kids have missed half a year and forgotten a lot of what they learned last fall. When schools open, there will be lots of triage about what absolutely must be retaught and what can be dropped.
And inevitably, there will be rolling lockdowns in different areas. The myth of everyone across the country mastering all the same material at the same rate will die a well-deserved death.
I also foresee a lot of older teachers and administrators deciding it’s time to retire. This will have consequences because their knowledge and skills took decades to develop and there will be no way to substitute for it. That will add to the chaos.
WaterGirl
@Kay: I don’t disagree with the consequences you’ve laid out.
As I said: I know there are reasons.
I still think that it’s not going to turn out well from a public health standpoint,
WaterGirl
@joel hanes: We really need to not put so much on schools, just as we need to not put so much on the police.
Schools should not be the way kids can get enough to eat, etc.
joel hanes
@Kay:
IMHO, meat-packing plants are not essential, and should have closed, or run at 1/100th capacity. Particularly inasmuch as much of the meat produced is being exported.
I admire your moral outrage; again, I hope I’m wrong about all of this.
But parents are really bad at comparative evaluation of risks to their kids, and I think that once an outbreak starts in a school, they’ll force the administrations to abandon cool calculation.
Again, I hope I’m wrong about all of this.
And now I’m done. Be well.
J R in WV
@trollhattan:
Larry Cook of Stop Mandatory Vaccination and everyone in Freedom Angles should get their wish, if they don’t want a vaccination. But they should go on permanent quarantine in work camps, where they get to earn their food with hard work on industrial farms. Not out with the rest of us who want to NOT spread a potentially fatal disease. If they are linked to a disease outbreak, they should be imprisoned for their crime, and it is a crime, spreading a disease by not following health directives.
OGLiberal
@Ohio Mom: As I noted above, we home school so whether or not schools open isn’t an issue for us but I have always hated those standardized tests, going back to when I was a student. I could always ace them but so much class time was spent prepping for them and I had some intelligent friends, good students otherwise, who scored much lower than they should have because the didn’t do well under that kind of pressure. So if one result is that they go away, good riddance. Sadly, lot of money in that industry and they’ll fight like hell to keep them around.
One way we could cut down on exposure among older people is if companies like mine, where probably 90% of the folks who work there can do just as good and as effective a job working from home, gave up on the old school belief that you have to be in the office because of reasons. It’s mostly top execs (who have to be in the office for 1,000 meetings a day) and sale folks making this argument. Fine, y’all go back and let us do as good a job or better (less stress, less time wasted on commute, less time spent on BS water cooler chatter, etc) working from home. I’ve been lucky to have been able to work from home the last five years because of some family medical situations and understanding managers, but it’s not official company policy. And I know plenty of jobs can’t be done from home/remotely. But, come on white collar senior managers – give it up.
jl
If Switzerland and Greece can both open their schools and not suffer a big second wave, and Australia could keep the schools mostly open all the way through the initial attack of the new bug, that shows it can be done. They all took different approaches, which they thought were best adapted to their circumstances. But then, you can read detailed careful studies they did on how to design effective controls, and then laid down the cash to get them done. I don’t see either in the US. Greece did have a big outbreak but that was when they got sloppy in opening their tourist industry, and got infections from a flight of tourists from the Middle East, not the schools.
The US is exceptional in a bad way. For us, even the good news coming out is not good news for us. I heard radio report on new research that says age alone is not an important risk factor, it is obesity, heart disease, other comorbidities, which in many countries are much higher with age. But our population health is so lousy, even that good news may not help much. Edit: news story was because CDC took age alone off the list of risk factors, which I would normally suspect due to Trumpster deviltry, but the story cited research so I hope it is legit.
It is really disgusting. The US couldn’t wipe its own ass in the initial stages of the epidemic, and now that more and more countries are showing how to handle it without destroying society and the economy, the US is unable or unwilling to follow any example. And a horrible American exceptionalism seems to be at work as well, i hear people saying that ‘well that won’t work in the US because “reasons” ‘ to any and all policies tried in other places. Well, every country has to adapt policies to its unique situation, and every country has its own unique problems.
I get the feeling sometimes that the public sphere in our country is so hollowed out and ruined in a number of ways, we can’t really solve any major social problem anymore. I hope enough people stay mad that it might change in 2021.
jl
@OGLiberal: In SF Bay, summer schools opening in so many places, that a lot of the teachers aren’t getting any summer off.
But, can the US plan its work and work its plan, and devote resources to those plans anymore. So, several countries have had success with schools. I heard a news report that the UK did it slapdash, and had to close them again after two week. Will the US be the UK, or one of the successful countries at running schools?
Miss Bianca
@JPL:
Oh, you don’t say!
Seriously, huge fucking scandal #9,999 has to wait its turn for its fifteen
minutesseconds of imfamy, I guess…Major Major Major Major
@zzyzx: I was (not) shocked to find that all those techies patting themselves on the back for “understanding exponential growth” were completely unaware that diseases follow logistic curves.
OGLiberal
@jl: I wouldn’t bet on the latter. My guess is there are plenty of good, educational professionals who could come up with a way to do and most of them are already probably working in our public schools right now. But they won’t be given the resources to do it because, “grrr….property taxes, teachers are lazy moochers, grrr!”
Also, I’m also 100% certain that right now Betsy Devos and others like her are devising some sort of scheme that shows that only privatization can solve the education problems in a post-pandemic world. That is something I’d bet on – not their scheme but that they are working on one.
cain
@Ramiah Ariya:
As a group, we indians care about health – mental and physical and so we are less going to feel entitled about this kind of thing than people from Texas and Florida seem to be.
Major Major Major Major
@DropKicker1: what about for permanent residency though is that still okay? Asking for a me
James E Powell
@joel hanes:
Thanks for that. I’ve read that taking on mental challenges in old age is a way to fight off dementia. I’ve had a paralyzing fear of that ever since I watched my father die of it.
James E Powell
@DropKicker1:
The caravans are coming!
jl
OK, I should have looked up the news stories and research after hearing the news story about CDC removing age as an independent risk factor. Not as good news as the piece said. CDC still says that there is a gradient of risk with age, but hard to disentangle form the chronic diseases themselves. So emphasizing disease rather than age except for elderly. The bad news is that the list of chronic disease risk factors expanded, so more people in US at high risk regardless of age. Obesity particularly is more important risk factor than thought before, which is bad news for the US.
J R in WV
@James E Powell:
I took calc in my 30s as a computer science major, along with math majors and physics majors who all loved math. I took 3 courses, 13 semester hours, two Cs and a B the last semester. Also discrete math and linear math.
So it can be done.
I will confess I spent a lot of time in the “math lab” with a wonderful grad assistant who was a ton of help…
J R in WV
@WereBear:
Strongly disagree. Took 3 big Calc classes, just 2 – 3 hour stats classes — for me stats was really hard, didn’t really make enough sense to understand, so was rote memorization with no utility going forward, except that statistics are easily used to lie…
Calc on the other hand was really cool once we got to orbital math, computing how to meet another orbiting object, etc. Now wish I had stuck with that kind of math. And Latin… reading J. Caesar was pretty cool, and Livy,
Aaron
“Branch Covidians”
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
@James E Powell:
Hello James, I’ll explain what 1st, 2nd. and 3rd derivatives are.
You look at the total number of infected over time, and you have a wiggly curve but it’s not that useful other than seeing how many people have been infected. You may have also noticed that many people look at the graph of how many new people have been infected that day over time, because it’s more useful to see if the spread is getting better or worse.
That new-people-infected-by-day (NPIBD) graph is essentially the first derivative of the total number of people infected over time (TNPIT) Graph. The NPIBD also shows the slope of the TNPIT at any point, A commonly used example of this is that the speedometer in your car is the first derivative of your odometer.
Finally, the NPIDB graph is also a wiggly graph, it has a changing slope too. if you take the slope again like what we did with the first two graphs, you get the Second derivative, do that again on the new graph an you would get the third derivative graph.
Ladyraxterinok
@bluehill:
Peter Thielnwas an undergraduate at Stanford. His mentor yhere was Rene Girard. Some time ago Adam did a very informative and positive post on him. I was shocked when I later saw Thiel said he was influenced by him
DropKicker1
@Major Major Major Major: Actually, when I went to university, half the Philosophy Dept were transplanted Americans; nice people!
The US called them draft dodgers (this was Vietnam days). I called them “friends”
Come ahead!
Mike
DropKicker1
@James E Powell: Noooo! Just remember that it snows up here…as soom as you cross the 49th.
Bring snowtires.
Mike
Ladyraxterinok
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
But I think his choices were somewhere in TX or in Tulsa. Someone in Tulsa even redid the face of the gigantic statue the Tulsa Driller* to look like Musk, thinking he’d like that!
* To honor Tulsa’s former title as The Oil Capitol of the World. The city lost the title and hosting the International Petroleum Exposition every 3 years because the oil execs all moved headquarters to TX. Why? OK had/has personal income tax and TX doesn’t!
Ladyraxterinok
@LongHairedWeirdo:
Are you a teacher? You should be. That was very clear.I actually understood it, although I graduated college 50 some yrs ago.
Gretchen
@Brachiator: Zoom weddings are a thing. I’ve seen two so far. I wish that’s what they were doing.
Gretchen
@Ladyraxterinok: yes, and I didn’t understand calculus when I took it. Twice. Maybe I would have with a good teacher.
Brachiator
@OGLiberal:
Don’t know if this thread is still rocking, but …
To somewhat simplify, people are stupid, especially with the “they were going to die anyway” stuff. Not all elderly people get the virus or die from it. There seems to be a large asymmetry between elderly men and elderly women. Men are more than twice as likely to die from the virus than women.
Also, people just don’t freaking understand life expectancy. The average life expectancy of a person age 85 is 6 years. They ain’t necessarily going to “die anyway,” certainly not tomorrow. And they have a 75 percent chance of living at least 3 years.
Conservatives like to claim that they are hard-headed realists, but they are really some of the dumbest ass people in the world.
Gretchen
@Ohio Mom: Columbus. I’m more worried about the flight there. Everything once I get there is outside and distanced. And we will zoom if we have to.
Gretchen
@JPL: the fiancé’s family have been strictly isolating. We haven’t quite, since our son lives with us and works in a restaurant, although he keeps to his room. I think the people we will interact with have been careful.
Gretchen
@WaterGirl: Thank you. I just don’t know what’s the best thing to do. And I’m in charge of transporting the wedding cake from a gluten-free bakery here. My daughter has celiac and wants to be able to eat on her wedding day.
Ladyraxterinok
@Kay:
Thank you. You never allow us to forget how bnb important the kids and their education are.
Even before covid, schools in states like OK were in dire shape.
OK has gone so far ar down. When I graduated from HS in Tulsa in 57, 2 of the cities’ 3 (white) high schools made the list of the best high schools in the US. Today I doubt we’d even come close.
Of course 2 well off suburbs (where white parents fled to escape Tulsa’s school desegregation) are doing pretty well
ballerat
In any reasonable and common-sense world they shouldn’t have to. But that’s not where we are.
It could be done right with creative thinking and policies to minimize risk. But that’s not where we are.
Yes they will reopen the schools this fall. For all of the reasons you state, especially from the desperation of working parents, which are most parents.
But they will be unable to do it safely enough, due to budget and lack of political will. Many communities won’t want to spend the money or have the money to spend, and many won’t support what needs to be done. Even wearing a mask is too damn much to ask.
And when a bigger, nationwide wave of infections results, and it will, they will close the schools again.
We will get the worst of both possibilities because the virus won’t wait until January 20 and Republicans won’t ever do the right thing, even if they lose, and their followers will go along with them, even if they die.
The party of Trump loves the uneducated. They don’t care about at-risk youth. They like prisons. And they still believe it’s mostly old and weak and minorities and city people who are dying. They and 40% of this country are OK with all that.
ballerat
No, it didn’t. But they wanted this way. Their way.
Once, more than 20 years ago, an abusive man in a small community in Colorado was being divorced and his wife was disputing custody of their child. He shot her in the head, then shot the child, then himself, in broad daylight in front of the courthouse. I, on my lunch break, happened across the scene a few minutes later. And along with the shock and the horror all I could think was the senselessness of it. It didn’t have to be like that.
Like asshole abusers, conservatives and trumpers especially think losing power over others is the end of their world. And they will shoot the world in the head rather than let go of it. Because the world might do just fine without them. If they can’t have the world no one can.
It didn’t have to be this way, but it’s what they wanted. Insisted. Demanded. Chose. It’s a last act of control.
Jim Bales
John,
You write: “I am so exasperated with these people that all I can muster half the time is “fucking asshole” or “this fucking idiot” or “you stupid cocksucker” or something similar.”
I knew a fellow on shipboard once who coined the perfect phrase for such occasions. He called someone a “festering colonic abscess.”
Feel free to use it, no need for attribution.
Best,
Jim
Kay
@ballerat:
It’s a great political opportunity for Democrats:
Democrats are good at this practical stuff. Return to school/child care is exactly in their wheelhouse. They don’t have to (and can’t) micromanage it. Just outline what the federal role should be and then fill it in.
Galahad Threepwood
I am so angry at the fucking waste of life who bears the title of Governor of Texas that I could scream. What an absolute fuckwaffle. I wish we could bring back tarring and feathering, because after Trump, Greg Fucking Abbott would be my next candidate for that treatment.
WaterGirl
@Gretchen: Maybe it’s just me, but knowing you would have to fly puts me in the “I really think I wouldn’t go column”, but I am certainly on the cautious side when it comes to COVID.
I wouldn’t let the cake factor into it – I think you guys should line up a cake locally because any number of things could happen between now and then. Worst case, you have two cakes.
ballerat
@Kay: Dems can and should outline what the feds should do. But as for the federal role actually being fulfilled, these trump assholes refuse even paying lip service to basic public health measures. At the coronavirus taskforce briefing Pence did not mention wearing a mask would help. Nor did he wear one. Now they will need to respond like adults to an entire list of common sense stuff that Dems have drawn up. I don’t think they will.
We can change this after Jan 20. But I have no idea how to change this before schools re-open in the fall.
Ohio Mom
Gretchen,
I’m with WaterGirl, have the family in Columbus have the fun task of finding a cake. Columbus is a hip-happening place and has a number of gluten-free bakeries (and an excellent ice cream chain, Jeni’s, but maybe that is besides the point).
No one can answer the question, Should you fly? for you.
Ohio Dad is currently on an unavoidable business trip to Nevada. He wore a N95 mask starting as soon as he entered the terminal and once in his seat, made sure the air nozzle was blowing hard on him because someone told us that would help keep him safe (is that true, we don’t know).
There are lots of articles to be googled on flying. From what I can tell, it seems to be an intermediate risk. One article I particularly liked was: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/08/upshot/when-epidemiologists-will-do-everyday-things-coronavirus.html
i don’t know how long-distance driving compares to flying. Probably depends a bit on what’s going on in the states you are driving through. See this: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/16/816707182/map-tracking-the-spread-of-the-coronavirus-in-the-u-s
Whatever you decide to do, Congrats on your daughter getting married!
Gretchen
@Ohio Mom: thanks. Your links will give me something to consider.
Hdawg
AMEN BROTHER!!! I coudn’t have wrote this article better myself. We all heard warnings from Doctors and CDC that a second wave was coming. Texas was one of the first states to begin reopening. All because this cocksucker wanted to get on his knees to suck Trumps dick and pleasure him and his ego. One of the biggest spikes in the US is Texas and Florida. Now we are back to square one when we didn’t have to be here in the first place!!! This is no time for a fuckin “Opps, my bad” moment. Lives are LITERALLY at stake here and he decided to politicize it for his own party. He’s a fucking joke!!!
ballerat
@Kay: Thread is dead but I want to say, I agree with everything you’ve said. It just infuriates me I unfortunately believe we won’t get this right, for anyone. Children and yes inevitably their parents, their grandparents.
The other thing that pissed me off? We’ve been asked, no, exhorted and prodded and even forced to “open” our communities. We have this massive effort by republicans and the chamber of commerce uber alles fucks to risk our lives (not theirs, natch) so they can make a buck. So the stock market numbers improve. Not for the schmoe who tends tables or the young person just out of school needing a job. The GOP and their wealthy donors are urging us to die for a better return and improved re-election prospects.
They literally made that the hill to die on.
But do it for our children? For their future? For their education and a chance at a better life? We weren’t asked to do shit.
I think people would’ve done it for them if they had phrased it that way. We would’ve taken risks. They could have gotten what they wanted if they had actually given a fuck about our children and their future.
Now, it will be harder. Some have literally given their lives so some red state gov can look good for Trump’s economy. People can only be asked for that kind of sacrifice only so often. I think Trump and Republicans squandered much of it.
God I hate these people.