Virus in US

[Come on Titans]

[tgo]

 

[Come on Titans]

[Come on Titans]

sorry for all the cartoons (and other) this morning....

Edited May 4, 2020 by Come on Titans

[GOAT9]

All rural areas should be opened. Urban areas should stay closed. The shit hangs in the air so areas with dense populations where people live on top of each other are going to be the problem areas. Common sense, but that left humanity at least 20 years ago. 

[abenjami]

26 minutes ago, GOAT9 said:

All rural areas should be opened. Urban areas should stay closed. The shit hangs in the air so areas with dense populations where people live on top of each other are going to be the problem areas. Common sense, but that left humanity at least 20 years ago. 

 

What happens when the urbanites go to the rural areas?

[Pragidealist]

36 minutes ago, GOAT9 said:

All rural areas should be opened. Urban areas should stay closed. The shit hangs in the air so areas with dense populations where people live on top of each other are going to be the problem areas. Common sense, but that left humanity at least 20 years ago. 

 

This plan is a covert and cold hearted attempt to lower the number of Trump supporters, right? 

[Pragidealist]

10 minutes ago, abenjami said:

 

What happens when the urbanites go to the rural areas?

It's like Darwin is rising from his grave and pointing his finger at people.   I saw an article where a trump supporter was wondering why barbers were not named as essential.  Protesting in large groups, leader telling them to poison themselves, now people wanting to close down only big cities and let rural areas do whatever they want...   

 

 

[Starkiller]

5 minutes ago, Pragidealist said:

It's like Darwin is rising from his grave and pointing his finger at people.   I saw an article where a trump supporter was wondering why barbers were not named as essential.  Protesting in large groups, leader telling them to poison themselves, now people wanting to close down only big cities and let rural areas do whatever they want...   

These are people who celebrate states' rights to have slaves but not states' right to fight a pandemic.

[Pragidealist]

35 minutes ago, Soxcat said:

 

As we learn more about the virus there appears to be little chance of getting the virus through air conditioning or even normal breaths although it is a good idea to increase the amount of make up air in building systems. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This isn't true.  The virus attaches itself to aerosol in the air.  It lingers in the air.  Air conditioning and more open spaces are less risky as closed in spaces but it's still spread via the air. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7094991/

[Pragidealist]

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/tiny-airborne-particles-may-carry-the-new-coronavirus

 

Opening up is about three things. 1) Economic impact vs health impact and 2) have they flattened the curve enough for the health system to be able to manage the high number of sick, 3) are we testing enough so that we can isolate the infected and keep them away from health and vulnerable populations. 

 

 

Edited May 4, 2020 by Pragidealist

[IsntLifeFunny]

Woof. This is from a fairly renowned lady who won a Nobl...err Pulitzer for her work on HIV. She also has been saying for years the world was facing this type of plague. 
 

Having long followed Garrett’s work, I can attest that it’s not driven by partisanship. She praised George W. Bush for fighting H.I.V. in Africa.

But she called Trump “the most incompetent, foolhardy buffoon imaginable.”

And she’s shocked that America isn’t in a position to lead the global response to this crisis, in part because science and scientists have been so degraded under Trump.

Referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and its analogues abroad, she told me: “I’ve heard from every C.D.C. in the world — the European C.D.C., the African C.D.C., China C.D.C. — and they say, ‘Normally our first call is to Atlanta, but we ain’t hearing back.’ There’s nothing going on down there. They’ve gutted that place. They’ve gagged that place. I can’t get calls returned anymore. Nobody down there is feeling like it’s safe to talk. Have you even seen anything important and vital coming out of the C.D.C.?”

The problem, Garrett added, is bigger than Trump and older than his presidency. America has never been sufficiently invested in public health. The riches and renown go mostly to physicians who find new and better ways to treat heart disease, cancer and the like. The big political conversation is about individuals’ access to health care.

But what about the work to keep our air and water safe for everyone, to design policies and systems for quickly detecting outbreaks, containing them and protecting entire populations? Where are the rewards for the architects of that?

Garrett recounted her time at Harvard. “The medical school is all marble, with these grand columns,” she said. “The school of public health is this funky building, the ugliest possible architecture, with the ceilings falling in.”

“That’s America?” I asked.

“That’s America,” she said.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/opinion/she-predicted-the-coronavirus-what-does-she-foresee-next/ar-BB13yY8A

[9 Nines]

2 hours ago, abenjami said:

 

What happens when the urbanites go to the rural areas?

 

Trump/Qanon said the virus is smart and knows urban from rural areas and it chooses not to go rural places. 

[abenjami]

2 hours ago, Soxcat said:

 

There is also no evidence the virus is contagious on most surfaces for very long.  Otherwise the handling of mail, packages and the exchange of money would be points of contact.

 

This is also not true.  There have been numerous studies conducted over the past 2 months showing very specifically how long the virus remains on a variety of common surfaces.

[IsntLifeFunny]

How is it possible that I've come partially to respect and admire George W. Bush?

Maybe you've been wondering the same thing about yourself.
 

If you're like me, you were a severe critic of Bush during his presidency. You disliked the irresponsible tax cuts for the upper class that turned a budget surplus under his predecessor into a deficit. You rolled your eyes when he relied on his "gut" in dealing with foreign leaders. You were angered by his effort to privatize Social Security. You were distressed by his fondness for pursuing an agenda favored by the religious right, and especially his attempt to mobilize voters using prejudice against homosexuality. And most of all, you were furious that he made an unforced world-historical error in toppling the government of Iraq and destabilizing the Middle East for much of the next two decades.

Yet here we are, more than 11 years since he left office, and more than three years into the appalling presidency of Donald Trump, and Bush no longer seems quite so bad. Some of this is a function of the contrast with Trump. Instead of trying to eliminate the health insurance relied upon by millions, Bush oversaw the expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs. Instead of stoking xenophobia, attempting to shut down immigration, and imposing a travel ban on people from majority-Muslim countries, Bush consistently favored a more liberal immigration policy and took a stand against anti-Muslims bigotry after the 9/11 attacks. Instead of striving to put "America first" in all things and failing to take public-health issues seriously, Bush spearheaded an effort to fight AIDS in Africa — an initiative that was an enormous (and largely unheralded) humanitarian and geopolitical success.

 

The bright spots in Bush's policy record aren't enough to get me to overlook all the things that made me dislike him when he was in office. But the 3-minute video Bush released on Saturday pointsto something that I thoroughly took for granted during his presidency (and during every other presidency in my lifetime). It's a quality I've come to appreciate, admire, and miss terribly through the civic desert of the Trump administration: the capacity of a president to rise above partisanship to speak from and to the nation as a whole.

 

This isn't just some idle quality that sentimental Americans like their presidents to possess. It's one of the two fundamental responsibilities of the presidential office — to serve both as head of the executive branch of government and head of state. The second of these duties is as essential as the first — and for all of Trump's difficulty handling the managerial and policy challenges of running the executive branch, his inability to speak in high-minded terms about the good of the nation as a whole, about the need to rise above factionalism, and about our capacity to feel a part of a whole that's larger than ourselves is total, is one of his greatest failings as president. And it's been even more glaringly obvious since the pandemic took hold in mid-March. As much as anything over the past three years, Bush's video helps us to recognize this shortcoming for the fatal flaw that it is.

 

https://theweek.com/articles/912481/how-george-w-bush-exposed-trumps-biggest-failure

 

Damn good article.