BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

the press have willingly missed the point there. it's an open secret that dom is basically directing government. it's why the cabinet ministers have been in such fear of him, and why johnson would be hopeless without him. johnson does not have a vision or political programme. he only wanted to have the job. that was an end-in-itself. dom is the man with the ideas. and, considering that he directed the brexit campaign (mendaciously and underhandedly, as is well-documented) and, considering he directed the winning election campaign, boris has somewhat grown to be dependent upon him. no dom, no poisonous dom tactics, no toxic dom ideology, and boris evaporates. there is nothing substantial to boris johnson.

"Two weeks after court scraps Safer at Home, Wisconsin sets record for new coronavirus cases and deaths"

Two weeks to the day after the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned Governor Tony Evers’ “Safer at Home” order, the state has set a one-day record for new coronavirus cases, as 642 positive cases were identified in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 16,565 — and increasing the number of currently active cases by more than 10 percent.

Additionally, the day was the deadliest so far, as 22 people succumbed to COVID19 since this time Tuesday, bringing the total death toll to 539.

The percentage of coronavirus tests coming back positive also rose from 3.6 percent to 5.8 in the past 24 hours.

Virginia is now getting hit hard too. All time highs in the thousands. Unfortunately it is in the Northern Virginia area, the urbanized blue part.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Jay wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Killing a cow. Too hard. Packaging orange. Impossible to learn.

They're specialty skills. Could you kill and butcher a cow? Could you operate orange picking machinery and know where to send it? Our economy is specialized. I wouldn't know the first thing about butchering a cow, and frankly, I don't want to. I pay other people to do it for me. The military's job is to fight with guns against other people with guns. That's their specialization.

Most 'skills' can be taught in a few hours if people pay attention.

i think jay is missing the rather obvious point, here, that trump was voted into office by a large portion of his following who believed he would build a wall across the entire contiguous border of mexico.

but apparently mobilizing any sort of large-scale effort to tackle a pandemic is hopeless. how can the federal government possibly achieve this?

100,000 dead in america and trump spent the day moaning that twitter is fact-checking him. stay classy.

maybe he should promise a meaningful pandemic response, and force china to pay for it!!!!

the amazing thing with viruses is that they are totally impervious to political bluster.

over a long enough timeframe, every single politicized 'approach' and 'response' will be shown for what it is.

USA, brazil, russia will top the tables pretty handily, if things continue as they are. that's no accident.

sweden has the worst performance of any scandinavian nation. that's no accident.

Thing is it targets everyone it can. Just because some people can't afford to bunker up in well-endowed mansions doesn't mean they're stupid.

Oh no. Not the southern states now too.

A funny thing: a republican in the Pennsylvania state house had COVID. All of the Republicans were notified and took precautions. The democrats in the statehouse weren't told until months later.

Headline: "The CDC projects that the US will suffer 123,000 coronavirus deaths by June 20." That's not good. CDC is expecting about a thousand deaths a day consistently through June.

UK is relaxing prematurely, too. worst stats in europe and bojo is trying to throw sops to the populace to calm frayed nerves over his advisor scandal.

complete piss-take, to be honest. because the sun is out we think it's gone away.

https://twitter.com/BBCFergusWalsh/stat … 9299549192

Prof John Edmunds from LSHTM and a SAGE advisor says 8,000 current infections a day in community is high and many scientists would have preferred incidence down to lower levels before we relax lockdown measures.

He says test and trace won’t be able to push R below 1 so that would mean continuing with 8k cases a day and with 1% fatality = 80 deaths a day. Lifting the lockdown is a political decision says Edmunds and will mean we keep the incidence at the current level

If we had a good leader, economy, and the rest, we would build a parallel organization to the WHO and invite our allies to take part. But we have literally nothing going for us including having the worst leader since the Civil War and pretty possibly worst in our history. I am not convinced that the WHO did anything worth pulling out of either. I have read criticism of the WHO from right wing sources but I have so little trust of them that I am not unconvinced they are just unhappy that black guy runs it who also gets along with the Chinese. Basically scapegoating the WHO for Trump's failure.

uziq wrote:

trump has pulled the US out of the WHO. at the peak of an unprecedented global pandemic. oh dear.

the damage to US credibility will be permanent, i think. ceding control of the WHO to other actors (e.g. china) and then complaining when the WHO begins to develop relations with china is a master-stroke. well done.

Talked with a guy this morning about it. His take was that the "WHO was a political organization." OK. So cede political power to the Chinese.