America Now Has One-Third of the World's Confirmed Coronavirus Cases (miamiherald.com) 493
"Confirmed coronavirus cases world-wide Friday exceeded 2.7 million, with more than 190,000 dead," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing data from Johns Hopkins University.
While America has just 4.3% of the world's population, "The U.S. accounted for nearly a third of the cases, exceeding 869,000, and more than a quarter of the deaths, at 49,963." [Note: This comparison might be skewed by the number of countries underreporting their cases or deaths.]
The Miami Herald reports: The coronavirus has killed more than 50,000 people in the United States, just four days after passing 40,000 U.S. deaths on Sunday, Johns Hopkins University reports. The total as of early Friday afternoon was more than 50,370, up about 400 deaths since Thursday night, the data shows...
More than 25,000 people have died in Italy, and more than 22,000 in Spain... Most of the U.S. deaths have occurred in New York City: 16,388, the university says.
Two weeks ago America had just 20% of the world's confirmed fatalities.
While America has just 4.3% of the world's population, "The U.S. accounted for nearly a third of the cases, exceeding 869,000, and more than a quarter of the deaths, at 49,963." [Note: This comparison might be skewed by the number of countries underreporting their cases or deaths.]
The Miami Herald reports: The coronavirus has killed more than 50,000 people in the United States, just four days after passing 40,000 U.S. deaths on Sunday, Johns Hopkins University reports. The total as of early Friday afternoon was more than 50,370, up about 400 deaths since Thursday night, the data shows...
More than 25,000 people have died in Italy, and more than 22,000 in Spain... Most of the U.S. deaths have occurred in New York City: 16,388, the university says.
Two weeks ago America had just 20% of the world's confirmed fatalities.
Here comes the push (Score:2)
A more colorful mark than I was expecting, actually... [un.org]
American exceptionalism at its finest (Score:5, Funny)
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When have you last checked? In January?
Luxembourg, Portugal, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Estonia, Finland, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Poland, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Malts, Bulgaria, Latvia, Slovakia. These are the EU members with a lower per capita death rate.
A few points (Score:5, Insightful)
a) Confirmed cases is a largely meaningless metric; all it tells us is how MUCH we're testing. As the antibody tests show, this thing is far more prevalent than even the confirmed cases suggest.
b) Are we still believing China's numbers?
c) There have been enough concerns raised about the death count being accurate that it warrants a healthy dose of skepticism. Particularly when the medicare system is incentivizing covid19 outcomes ( don't take my word for it, google it ).
d) People die. That's the sad truth of the world, and despite what you may believe the lock down was never about preventing every death; it was about ensuring we had the hospital capacity to handle the surges. Well, now, because of the lockdown, people aren't getting needed surgeries AND hospitals are in precarious financial positions ( nurses and doctors laid off or taking pay cuts ).
Re:A few points (Score:4, Insightful)
How much do you think China lied? If it's an order of magnitude then the US is still a lot worse. If it's two orders of magnitude then the US is on track to be worse by next month.
Even the wildest speculation about China (e.g. the debunked 20,000 urns story) would put them well ahead of where the US is, especially when you consider that they have about 3.6x as many people.
Re:A few points (Score:4, Interesting)
a) agreed, to a point. But if you only test people who are already coughing (which is basically what we're doing now), all you do is confirm what you already know. Besides, in testing, the US is only on place 30 (per capita) while it's on place 17 per capita, so maybe that would not really result in a more favorable outcome for the US.
b) No. I believe they are at least a magnitude off. But even if we multiply what China admits with the factor 20, we're still far away from the US per capita.
c) Agreed. Maybe we should compare death count today to death count a year ago and compare that worldwide? Hint: You won't like it any better.
d) Welcome to the US hospital system. Strangely, the rest of the world doesn't have that problem, now what could the reason be?
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So let's ignore China if you do not trust the numbers. And Russia as well.
Absolutes are not interesting until after the pandemic is done, as totals. Also these do not account for different stages of the pandemic.
So, to judge health care efficiency or pandemic response we need relative statistics - a better one would be deaths/infected or infected/total statistics, still somewhat re-based to the location on the pandemic curve. And perhaps #test/total.
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a. The west only tests a few people even now - principally those going to hospital with symptoms.
b. China updates its numbers as rapidly as the west starts counting numbers in care homes and at home.
c. Are you saying that the excess death rate is down to money grabbing? Where do they get the money from it?
d. You live under a system that makes money out of sickness. And you still support this idea?
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despite what you may believe the lock down was never about preventing every death; it was about ensuring we had the hospital capacity to handle the surges.
This is what it is all about! More total infections isn't bad, it is the inevitable result. Minimizing the spread maximizes the next wave! Slowing the spread to keep hospitals from being overloaded, while still having enough people get infected to slow down the next wave, that's the sweet spot.
Re:A few points (Score:4, Informative)
b) Are we still believing China's numbers?
And if we don't, what are the actual numbers? Even if we quadruple China's numbers they still would be lower than the US. For China's number to be more, it would have to be 10X while bearing in mind China has more than 4X the population.
c) There have been enough concerns raised about the death count being accurate that it warrants a healthy dose of skepticism. Particularly when the medicare system is incentivizing covid19 outcomes ( don't take my word for it, google it ).
No. You made this claim. You back it up. I can claim that the NSA has done this make sure we all get mind-controlling implants. Don't take my word for it. Google it.
d) People die. That's the sad truth of the world, and despite what you may believe the lock down was never about preventing every death; it was about ensuring we had the hospital capacity to handle the surges.
Since when did anyone ever say that the lockdowns would prevent ALL deaths? I challenge you to find one person. It was to slow down the spread. It was to limit the spread to those who are vulnerable. It was to prevent some deaths.
Well, now, because of the lockdown, people aren't getting needed surgeries AND hospitals are in precarious financial positions ( nurses and doctors laid off or taking pay cuts ).
Elective surgeries were postponed. The key term you don't seem to recognize is "elective". If someone needs a heart bypass or emergency surgery, they'll get the surgery. If you want LASIK surgery to correct your vision, you'll have to wait. And the key word is "wait". Please point me to an article where doctors and nurses are being laid off. Because if they are, I know of many hospitals they can work right now to relieve overworked doctors and nurses.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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If you had told the greatest generation that in just 50 years or so their children, baby boomers, would squander the nations wealth, poison its water,
WTF do you know how good our water quality is compared to 50 years ago? And for that matter, medical care now is an order of magnitude better. Go look for pictures of rivers that are so polluted they are on fire. Educate yourself, don't make things up.
Re:A sign of the times i guess. (Score:5, Insightful)
A good point. The democrats republican lite candidate senile Biden might win but what will he do?
He'll appoint smart people and listen to them, which is the best that any president can do, and the primary thing that Trump has proven himself incapable of doing. Trump's criteria for who he hires and who he listens to aren't related to their competence or their ability to challenge him when he's making bad decisions, his criteria are who strokes his ego and demonstrates unswerving loyalty by papering over his mistakes. It's almost impossible for Biden to do a worse job.
Trump, will cure it. (Score:4, Funny)
Trump has determined that shining a UV light, or some kind of light .. any light into the lung .. will be sufficient to introduce in more cases than not, deleterious mutations in the virus. That coupled with some bad recombinants might be curative, who knows. I am sure that as president he doesn't want this virus happening in his watch, that's why he's gonna cure it instead of blame other people for their ineptitude. He is of great judgement and will no doubt on his first try select the best people to handle this and of course fire any bad ones instantly before they do harm.
We're about 18th when you rank per capita. (Score:5, Informative)
All things being equal, you expect bigger countries to report more cases, and the US is the third largest country in the world. The country with the highest per capita cases is the Northern Italian microstate of San Marino.
Reported Cases per Million Pop (selected countries):
San Marino (microstate): 15,119
Iceland: 5246 (see note)
Spain: 4789
Belgium: 3911
Italy: 3231
USA: 2809
Germany: 1855
Sweden: 1800 (see note)
Denmark: 1458
Norway: 1382
Finland: 808
note: these numbers are skewed by testing. Iceland has the highest number of tests per capita in the world,Sweden has one of the lowest among advanced states. Therefore you have to assume Sweden has more unreported cases than other similar countries.
Tests/100,000 population:
Iceland: 13,000
San Marino: 5,685
Norway: 2,861
Italy: 2,824
Denmark: 2360
US: 1500
Finland: 1404
Sweden: 935
India: 42
Given India's extremely low per capita test rate, it's a safe bet that they have hundreds of times more cases than reported. They may have more infections than the US; or if they don't they soon will.
If you're judging the robustness of a country's response, look at the ratio of tests performed to case found. That tells you how far behind a country is in looking for the virus.
Tests per case found:
Taiwan: 139
South Korea: 55
Iceland: 25
India: 23 (see note)
Norway: 21
Finland:17
Denmark: 16
Italy: 8.7
US: 5.5
Sweden: 5.2
UK: 4.3
note: You always want to think about the reality behind the numbers; the high number Indian tests/case probably reflects disparities between different economic groups.
India is testing way more than US (Score:3)
The positive rate in India for the tests is around 4% that is out of every 100 people tested 4 are testing as positive.
In the US the number is as high as 33% for infection testing (the kind of testing India is doing) and 15% for antibody testing.
India is testing contacts of positive Covid patients.
US is only testing symptomatic people
India imposed a mandatory quarantine for all travellers back in February and shut down all flights from Mid March
US only recommended people self quarantine and you can still t
Re:We're about 18th when you rank per capita. (Score:4, Interesting)
You *want* to see healthy people reflected in your test numbers -- to be doing a lot of testing per case found.
Seeing lots of cases found per test means you're mainly testing people you are pretty certain have it.
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Different numbers tell you different things. I agree that excess deaths is probably more important, but they don't necessarily tell you as much about the amount of virus circulating. And of course reported deaths has its limitations too, and should only be used to compare countries with similar levels of health care delivery. Even that can be skewed by the regional nature. US figures are dominated by New York City and the adjacent areas in NY State and NJ.
Re:We're about 18th when you rank per capita. (Score:5, Informative)
Italy has performed more testing per capita by far. But hey, we've tested a whole 1% of the population [newsweek.com], so go us!
Our test was so good that it could detect COVID when it wasn't even there [washingtonpost.com], so go us!
We have have plutocratic media [nytimes.com] to cover things up, so go us! Also, pretty sure that was an actual nurse, and there are tens of thousands of other actual doctors and nurses saying the same things, but run back to Fox News' "transparent" reporting.
And now we're literally making things up [wusa9.com], so go us!
Due to the severe shortage of tests [cnn.com], oddly enough.
Coronors disagree with you [post-gazette.com], but what do they know.
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Time/Old Age kills people faster in lock down than this does so far.
Do you have any reference that backs this up?
The reporting on what these numbers mean is as abhorrent as political polling
Not going to argue with that.
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It's true. The reporting on this has been utterly atrocious. I can't help but feel like it is heavily a politicization of the pandemic. Trying to make sure people blame Trump.
Get it straight people. Unadjusted, context-free totals are statistically meaningless, and are almost always employed for emotional effect.
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It's true. The reporting on this has been utterly atrocious. I can't help but feel like it is heavily a politicization of the pandemic. Trying to make sure people blame Trump.
Sorry Trump owns the politicization. He lacked leadership, rational assessment and actively participated in the politicization. Early on he went to one of his rallies and in order to get his base stirred up and loudly claimed “this is their new hoax”. Trump is continuously concerned about his ego and his MO is to spend most of his time engaging in petty attacks instead of leading and looking for common ground.
Re: What percentage of TESTs? (Score:2)
And it is a hoax. The EU has the worst in both absolute and relative numbers and they keep splitting them up into individual countries as if Costra vs ENEL or Brexit never happened.
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Looks like someone is still sipping Clorox...
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Of course this logic applies equally to the Chinese. They have faults in their reporting systems just like the west do. Arguing over who reports on the greatest number of deaths is irrelevant when you get a pandemic that is killing a proportion of a naieve population at somewhere between five and two hundred times the death rate of flu. Any way you look at it we need to take it seriously. It is true that it prefferentially kills older people and that the billionaires who run American propaganda are predomi
that is nonsense (Score:4, Informative)
Nope, the best test of that we have is the NHS reporting for UK death compared with previous year / previous 5 or 10 years averaged. There is a spike of death and they are not due to old age.
Re:What percentage of TESTs? (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a difference between living 70-80 years and then dying of old age and dying suddenly while you still have dependants and another 40+ years you could reasonably expect to get.
From an economic point of view the loss of a productive worker and the need to support their surviving family and maybe pay out on a life assurance policy, as well as the cost of treating them before they died, is all much more significant than the loss of someone who has already retired.
In other words it's not a like-for-like comparison.
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And most of the world has not been testing the dead.
References please or is this your "gut" feel.
And what proportion of US dead are not tested and not counted? The US has many cases that were not tested because of extreme shortages of testing kits.
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
https://www.bridgemi.com/michi... [bridgemi.com]
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One big difference is that in the US if you didn't test a dead person, the doctor looks at their symptoms and makes a best guess.
Almost nobody else is counting these deaths. You can't say "citation needed" for a negative claim; it is the positive claim that would have evidence! Almost nobody else even has a policy where they can count the dead without having had a test done, and nobody has that many tests. So they're under counting, systemically.
Everybody knows this; there are lots of controversial things t
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One big difference is that in the US if you didn't test a dead person, the doctor looks at their symptoms and makes a best guess.
What is your basis for claiming this? I just provided examples of people NOT being counted in the US.
“The issue is there are a number of people who die ... outside of hospitals. EMS shows up and they do [cardiopulmonary resuscitation,] and the automatic assumption is that [the person’s] age or comorbidity — maybe emphysema — pushed them over the edge,”
https://www.bridgemi.com/michi... [bridgemi.com]
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Testing and cause of death reporting has been problematic. However, one measure of death is the crude death rate which has jumped by 20% to 30% in all epidemic countries so we can say that your statement that "Time/Old Age kills people faster" is clearly false.
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The OP said "Europe", not "Italy". You picked Italy because it's the worst-performing country in Europe and it would favour the comparison you wanted to draw. You could have picked Germany instead, which is larger than Italy and is doing much better on covid deaths, but that wouldn't have suited you.
Anyhoo, let's run the numbers. Who's ready for some basic maths:
Populations: US 330m; Germany 80m; Italy 60m.
Covid deaths to date: US 53k; Germany 6k; Italy 26k.
Covid death rates per 100k population: US: 16; Ger
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:5, Informative)
Country Deaths per million
Belgium 568.20
Spain 474.21
Italy 422.78
France 326.27
UK 281.82
Netherlands 242.41
Sweden 198.46
Switzerland 181.88
Ireland 163.59
US 152.49
Germany 67.23
Iran 67.00
Canada 60.47
Greece 11.84
South Korea 4.65
Russia 3.84
New Zealand 3.48
China 3.33
Japan 2.59
The US is 45x worse than China so even if you think they are covering it up by an order of magnitude it's still worse. But the US is also doing a lot better than some European countries.
People have suggested that population density might be an issue but check out Japan right down at the bottom. The key factor seems to be declaring lockdown or starting a massive testing programme early.
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Dude, don't put you're whole post in monospace just to get the table.
The US is 45x worse than China so even if you think they are covering it up by an order of magnitude
Of course I don't think China is covering up deaths by an order of magnitude, I think they're covering up deaths by three orders of magnitude! OK, we really have no idea, which was the point of the totalitarian censorship after all. And people are talking about the deaths in China from CV19, not the deaths in China's concentration camps, or that China has apparently segregated all black people, so that's a win for China.
People have suggested that population density might be an issue but check out Japan right down at the bottom. The key factor seems to be declaring lockdown or starting a massive testing programme early.
Pretty sure Japa
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I tried to only monospace the table but the lameness filter wouldn't allow too. Too many formatting spaces I guess. Deal with it.
3 orders of magnitude you say, so about half a million deaths that somehow nobody was able to provide any evidence of even in a country where everyone has a camera phone and much smaller things come out all the time? In an age where trying to incinerate half a million bodies in a short space of time would be quickly spotted from space, like much lesser mass cremations/burials have
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Of course I don't think China is covering up deaths by an order of magnitude, I think they're covering up deaths by three orders of magnitude! OK, we really have no idea, which was the point of the totalitarian censorship after all. And people are talking about the deaths in China from CV19, not the deaths in China's concentration camps, or that China has apparently segregated all black people, so that's a win for China.
Currently China has about 5,000 deaths. By your numbers, China is covering up that just under 5 million people have died there in 3 months. 5 million. I find that hard to believe.
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Look at all the information coming out of the concentration camps for Uyguir Muslims (when they're not having their organs harvested). And Hong Kong! Man that pandemic just came along conveniently, didn't it?
I'm not sure what your experience is with bodies but how do you hide 5 million bodies in China? The city of Wuhan is about 11 million so I would think someone would notice half the city's population dying. 5 million bodies all over China would be noticeable especially when people's families start to notice them missing. We're not talking one or two people disappearing. 5 million people disappearing is hard to hide no matter what kind of communication lockdown is in place.
But I seriously doubt the low number they've reported.
Yes they may have under-reported the
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To be fair (not that he deserves it), Slashdot completely fucked up <ul> and <ol> when they moved to the current formatting, must be 10 years or so ago now, so everyone stopped using it. Since I haven't seen it for years, let's actually give it a try!
Unordered list:
Ordered list:
Well, in FF I see no bullets or numbers at all, and vastly too much space between the items (should be less than normal inter-paragra
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It's very interesting to compare Baltimore to Detroit. Similar government and demographics, but Detroit (Wayne county) was hit much harder than B-more, with a per-capita rate higher than New York (or did 4/7).
I'm not sure what's going on there. Detroit has much more international travel than B-more, but then LA and NYC are similar in that respect so clearly that's not the only factor. Cities that are similar but have very different Corona deaths will definitely be worth studying in depth over the next ye
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Here in Texas we also don't care abotu social distancing, except at the grocery store, and the hardware store is similarly packed. But we don't have these problems. Perhaps to save lives in the future we should develop a better theory that "ha hah rednecks", no?
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So you're saying This never happened? [youtube.com]
Mayor of Florence Dario Nardella has suggested residents hug Chinese people to encourage them in the fight against the novel coronavirus.
Bright idea, buddy.
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If you already think somebody is covering something up by an order of magnitude, and then you look at the numbers and they're still looking good, it is worth asking why you are limiting the coverup to one order of magnitude? Is that a natural limit for lies, or not?
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Well in this case the reason would be that it's very hard to cover up the deaths of half a million people (3 orders of magnitude). In fact even covering up one order of magnitude would be very hard, China isn't known for being able to hide stuff like this.
Think about it, how often do we hear about people being locked up or disappeared in China? And disposing of 50,000 extra bodies is not easy to hide either, the graves or smoke clouds can be seen from space and everyone in China has a camera phone.
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:4, Insightful)
plus the fact that that many bodies are difficult to hide, which probably gave rise to all the conspiranoia about urns and cellphones (fueled by a strong urge to come up with some scapegoat for all the monumental in-house fuck up, which has been plenty everywhere with very few exceptions).
an order of magnitude is huge if you actually think of the numbers more than falling for their rhetoric load.
that said all these numbers are the best indicator we can get but you shouldn't take any of them for the truth, not from any country, for a lot of different reasons. first it is very difficult to gather these stats at this scale in the first place. second, different administrations have different classification criteria for both infections and deaths. third, there are obvious external interests to this.
e.g. the official death numbers of spain don't include deaths in nursery homes even if they are confirmed virus cases. this isn't even a secret, that number is known and reported in some autonomous regions, but the central administration has just officially declined to account for them in their reports, and isn't the only one to do so. the total death rate would be even higher and actually close to double. note that's an impressive difference but is still far from an order of magnitude.
what these indicators can do is show trends over time and highlight the hotspots which is still useful. they should be taken with considerable amounts of salt though, and comparisons between countries except in very broad sense or assumptions about the real impact on the ground based on this data are very weak.
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But the US is also doing a lot better than some European countries.
These one-dimensional numbers are very misleading. For example, compare the lower right graph for the US and Switzerland on
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/op... [arcgis.com].
For the former, you have to go logarithmic to even see things are slowly getting less bad. For the latter it is very obvious that things are stable and getting better. At the same time, the absolute numbers seem to indicated that Switzerland is doing a bit worse than the US.
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:4, Informative)
People have suggested that population density might be an issue but check out Japan right down at the bottom. The key factor seems to be declaring lockdown or starting a massive testing programme early.
The death rate has got a lot more to do with the age profile of your population and how seriously you take lock down procedures than population density. Japan has about a third of the population that the US does, a large ageing population and a very high population density. The reason Japan doesn't have a three digit death rate is a high trust in science, competent government, a well functioning public healthcare system and people sticking to quarantine protocols and preventative measures. If there is one thing this pandemic has shown it is that the higher the trust levels towards science and government are the better such countries have come out of this mess.
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:4, Informative)
I'd also say it's because Japan's population density already has them in "pandemic mode" half the time. People there have been wearing masks in public during flu season for years as it is - the Coronavirus procedures weren't some kind of all new revolutionary thing for them to learn, and they don't have protestors outclaiming it's their God-given right to wander the streets without masks coughing in peoples' faces.
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Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:5, Funny)
You don't have to, but it saves you a lot of time.
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:4, Interesting)
Quite frankly, I think the actual Russian trolls have watched in amazement for a while and are fearing for their jobs now. Watching a large nation slowly to implode is something on does not get to witness very often.
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Well, Mission accomplished.
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
But suddenly, the U.S. gets hit by an pandemic that is no single person's fault (no, China is not a single person, and there are many others to blame for the spead), but a public problem, which runs afoul anything U.S. culture thinks about health care issues. And all of a sudden, the risk taker is no longer the hero, who might improve the world if he succeeds, but a public nuisance who endangers other people and can be fatal to them.
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, "screw you, I got mine" only works as long as your neighbor's problems don't become yours in the end.
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, "screw you, I got mine" only works as long as your neighbor's problems don't become yours in the end.
Indeed. One of the reasons that, for example, the fire brigade became a public service in most civilized places. But I think too many US citizens are too entrenched in their positions these days to see that their egoism is massively hurting themselves. Whatever capacity for actual insights they had has vanished into a quasi-religious crusade against "the others". That stance did not even work well for cave-men. It is deadly in this time and age where everything is connected.
That they elected a not very smart and completely unscrupulous arsonist as their leader is just an indicator where things are going.
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In all fairness, it's not like they have a choice in their elections.
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Whether scumbag A fleeces me or scumbag B fleeces me may make a huge difference for them, but why should I care?
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
The US is still living the repercussions from the cold war. Eisenhower added a bunch of religion to the US state in response to the official atheism of communism. Patriotism, nationalism and exceptionalism were pumped up with threats of foreign enemies, and "leader of the free world" rhetoric. "Socialism" was demonized, and most collective action (except military) became collateral damage.
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Despite his faults, he was still a better prez than the last 5 combined. He was not a showoff, he was not dumb and he was not a womanizer.
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
And the American education system doesn’t turn out people who understand the difference between socialism and communism. Another tick against the system.
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That's pretty silly. Socialism is an economic concept. Certain socialist socialist systems ended up killing lots of people. Capitalist systems, particularly the less restricted variety, have also killed lots of people.
Currently, the places in the world where you have the least risk of death are social democracies. These mix socialist and capitalist concepts, applying each where they make the most sense.
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:5, Informative)
I guess the insightful mod is deserved, but I would extend your argument to consider for-profit healthcare in general. That's largely based on my familiarity with the Japanese system, which is actually rather similar to ObamaCare (ACA), but with a public option. The non-profit insurance "company" run by the government does work well to keep the for-profit private insurance companies more honest. (That was in normal times. Right now no part of the healthcare system can be described as working well.)
However, Covid-19 is over-stressing the Japanese healthcare system. That's because in normal times profit maximization calls for pursuing efficiency. A for-profit healthcare system is NOT going to invest in excess capacity for medical emergencies. When the disaster does come (and it will, soon or later), the government is forced to step in because otherwise the private insurance companies will simply declare bankruptcy and walk away from the mess.
Interesting footnote is that just when we need them the most, many hospitals are losing money hand over fist. The routine medical care that generated their income has been cut off because they have to ramp up and focus on handling no-profit Covid-19 patients. Yet another economy reduced to flaming ruins, but at least the Japanese don't have the guns to take out their frustrations that way.
There's a lot more blood coming to an America near you. It's the guns, stupid.
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:5, Interesting)
Public systems don't invest in excess capacity either. Canada's medical system has crazy wait times for many procedures at the best of times and it's routine to have patients sitting in the hallway for days due to overcrowding.
The fact is that medical care requires a lot of expensive labour. Unlike the rest of the economy it has not embraced much automation, and in keeps adding new ways to treat people. Add that to an aging population and the fact is that any medical system will eat any amount of money thrown at it and still keep growing in need. And costs will rise disproportionate to the peoples' ability to pay because their labour has been devalued while medical workers' has not.
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Public systems don't invest in excess capacity either. Canada's medical system has crazy wait times for many procedures at the best of times and it's routine to have patients sitting in the hallway for days due to overcrowding.
Finding one bad example does not represent a indictment on the entire public healthcare concept. There are plenty of public healthcare systems around the world functioning just fine, and additionally most don't preclude a parallel private healthcare option.
"Crazy" waiting times are typically only for elective surgery except in extreme circumstances.
People sitting in hallways is an example of administrators unable to figure out how to use their scheduling software and has nothing to do with public systems.
Pu
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Public healthcare has one defining trait that is universal: Your problems are over when you get treated,
You should really think of a way to rephrase that, because what you said is not what you intended to say.
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No it says exactly what was intended. You're reading things which aren't there. The sentence makes no claims as to when you get treated.
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
So America had no healthcare issues under Bush? Under Clinton? Under Nixon, Carter, the other Bush? Did your problems with healthcare start with Obama?
Because I remember a lot of movies before then that involved people unable to pay their medical bills and therefore choosing not to go to the hospital despite being sick.
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:4, Funny)
You Americans must be tired of all this winning
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Re: All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:5, Interesting)
There isnâ(TM)t that much differenceâ¦
Current or previous administration, the health system in the USA remains a for-profit business.
No other "rich" country in the world considers healthcare optional, and yet collects a disproportionate amount of socialist financing from their citizens (i.e. IRS federal taxes) to fund weapon manufacturers and so-called defense sector.
A socialist-funded military, controlled by a federal government not elected democratically (1 person not equal to 1 vote, and a president who didn't even get a simple majority of votes), and a capitalist health system: a winning combination for the USA population ...except for the bottom 99%.
Re: All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry if "nationalist" is a dirty word to you.
Many people simply want to see their nation succeed.
And it doesn't HAVE to be a zero-sum game.
But when a president is shipping jobs (and pallets of cash) overseas, while telling hundreds of thousands of people "jobs aren't coming back!" and importing zillions of H1B's to fill jobs that people in this country could do...
Yeah! After a while, it becomes "fuck that, what about us?"
Re: All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason people don't like nationalists is that they want their country to succeed at the expense of others, and because they usually also want to keep out groups of people who don't look like them.
Historically these things have not worked out well for anyone.
Re: All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:4, Informative)
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Conveniently ignoring the fact that if more had been done to slow the spread of the virus and help those who got it many fewer would have died. Contact tracing and early lockdown have proven effective.
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There is no 20/20 hindsight here. it was clear from the start.
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Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:4, Informative)
He didn't COMPLETELY close the Canadian and Mexican borders right away. That was coming.
But he shut down all but citizen returns from China and most of the world on the 31st of January.
Unfortunately the earliest death we KNOW of due to COVID exacerbation in the US was on February 6th.
Given a 2 week incubation period...
And COVID had been knocking around since, we think, at least November 2019. Where there WERE no travel restrictions.
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh he locked down people who looked chinese while allowing over 40,000 people to fly back from the worst hit areas in china.
But it didn't matter. We now know that there was community spreading before the psuedo lockdown.
It's like his EU lockdown that made an exception for countries where he had golf courses. Not a real lockdown.
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You mean like China and the WHO telling us as late as JANUARY 29TH that COVID couldn't spread person to person...
They finally copped on January 30th. On January 31st, we shut down travel.
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20/20 hindsight is 20/20.
so south corea acted in hindsight?
did they have privy information? or did they just not sit around for weeks or even months babbling about how this was just a flu and actually did something to contain it?
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:5, Interesting)
No. They had more cases earlier than we did due to proximity.
So you think if the US had more cases earlier we would have responded as well as they did? That makes no sense whatsoever. Because our explosion in cases happened later we had more information than they did, and yet we still didn't respond as effectively.
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:4, Insightful)
As of this week, someone was downplaying the lack of testing kits still.
It's worse than that. After saying states are on their own and should get their act together, the con artist criticized Maryland governor Tom Hogan [wtop.com] for getting 500,000 test kits from South Korea.
“The governor of Maryland could have called Mike Pence, could have saved a lot of money I don’t think he needed to go to South Korea. I think he needed to get a little knowledge would’ve been helpful.”
So yeah, it's not only downplaying the lack of test kits, it's going after people who did what he told them to do: find their own way.
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What are you smoking? I advise you to stop, it removes your capability for rational thought.
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:5, Informative)
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:4, Interesting)
Nope. We only count it as a covid19 death if there was a test showing they had covid19.
So you have that basic fact wrong.
Now- we also dont' test people found dead. this is important because the number of people found dead in new york was up from 200 to 1100 in march. So that's 900 more who are probably covid19 that were not counted. We also didn't count many elderly people dying in rest homes until last week.
The number of deaths is low.
I agree with your point that getting money for c19 patients would be a valid incentive- but have to weight against that the fact that many people with symptoms are not being tested. There just are not enough reagents.
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:4, Informative)
Nope. We only count it as a covid19 death if there was a test showing they had covid19. So you have that basic fact wrong.
The New York Times disagrees [nytimes.com]:
The city has added more than 3,700 additional people who were presumed to have died of the coronavirus but had never tested positive.
Re:All that blood is on the hands of Republicans (Score:5, Informative)
The flaw in your argument is that New York's death rate is running double what it was the for the same month last year.
How exactly do you explain the increase?
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Free trade and oppen borders work well for capitalism. What does not work well is a lack of quarantine of travelers during a pandemic. What about the thousands of travelers allowed in without quarantine from China and Europe during the spread of this pandemic?
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If you had any real interest in knowing, you'd look it up yourself.
But you don't. You're simply invoking their names as a pacifier.
"But my binky!"
Re:Malediction (Score:4, Insightful)
Are they the POTUS? Does their statement change anything? Can they order something done?
If not, who the fuck cares?
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Do their statements carry any more weight than those of Elton John, Usain Bolt, or Garri Kasparov?
They are not medical professionals AND they are not the leaders of a country.
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You're right, Nancy Pelosi and Andrew Cuomo have not been doing good jobs as president of the fucking United States.
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So the whole thing is a hoax?
Damn, these dead people could have fooled me.
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Pretty sure that's from lack of testing. How many people do you think are being tested over there? Chalk it up to pneumonia and the flu.
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Yeah, but the people who did this now all live in Australia.
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-tl;dr