Coronavirus

[steviedresses]

KnightHawk & Stavros...

Don't know where you guys are from... but I am from the good ole USA. The USA has always put the economy ahead of lives, always. By some estimates, 50,000 people die in this country yearly because they don't have health insurance. I think the number is much, much, higher.

People without means DO NOT GO TO THE DOCTOR. They can't. It will bankrupt them. So a 40 year-old with a blood pressure of 150/100 never sees the doc, Kills over at 52 of a massive heart attack. Is he counted as dying because he didn't have health insurance? Probably not. And he could have lived to 80 with cheap generic drugs.

Of course we are opening too soon. Will probably kill an extra 100,000 people. But most of them will be poor without health insurance and showing up at the hospital way too late. So they will die.

But the economy will pick back up... maybe.

[filghy2]

This report says the the Trump administration buried CDC guidelines that were supposed to be issued on safe reopening of the economy. https://apnews.com/7a00d5fba3249e573d2ead4bd323a4d4

These charts show why it's clearly premature to be declaring victory.

[Stavros]

KnightHawk & Stavros...

Don't know where you guys are from... but I am from the good ole USA. The USA has always put the economy ahead of lives, always. By some estimates, 50,000 people die in this country yearly because they don't have health insurance. I think the number is much, much, higher.

People without means DO NOT GO TO THE DOCTOR. They can't. It will bankrupt them. So a 40 year-old with a blood pressure of 150/100 never sees the doc, Kills over at 52 of a massive heart attack. Is he counted as dying because he didn't have health insurance? Probably not. And he could have lived to 80 with cheap generic drugs.

Of course we are opening too soon. Will probably kill an extra 100,000 people. But most of them will be poor without health insurance and showing up at the hospital way too late. So they will die.

But the economy will pick back up... maybe.

Then some cynic will come along and point out that hundreds of thousands die every year from gunshot wounds, car accidents, the 'flu- Obesity, 'lifestyle' choices such as addictions and alcohol can kill even if these can be controlled and dealt with by the person- which of all these could have been avoided? Other than suicide and murder the point might be, which of these fatal incidents was intentional? The extra dimension with Covid 19 is that the source of the illness might lie in man's ambition, to make money from unusual forms of meat, to invade a wilderness in which rare animals -and unknown pathogens- live, where they should probably be left alone. How many pathogens lurk in the forests of Canada that have never felt a foot fall, what tiny winged creatures exist who for the first time in their short lives experience the taste of human blood and want more?

[Laphroaig]

"U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday declared it is time to reopen the country's economy, even if it means more people will fall victim to the coronavirus. "The people of our country are warriors," the president told reporters in the state of Arizona. "Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country open."

https://twitter.com/PoliticsJOE_UK/s...98158395150337

[Stavros]

This report says the the Trump administration buried CDC guidelines that were supposed to be issued on safe reopening of the economy. https://apnews.com/7a00d5fba3249e573d2ead4bd323a4d4

These charts show why it's clearly premature to be declaring victory.

I think we now know that we don't know the full truth of what our politicians were told in January and February, and that in the UK, probably in the US there will be a battle over the truth and the attempt to cover it up when it doesn't look good for those in power. That said, we may be lucky in the UK that we don't have a Modi who is using the 'lockdown' -in so many respects what Modi imposed on Kashmir last year- to extend the Nationalist campaign against India's Muslims. The Chinese had already been engaged in a campaign to change the social structure of Xinjiang, and one dreads to think of what could be happening in places like Egypt or Iraq, or African countries which have a system of some kind but lack the resources to deal with a pandemic of this nature. It would be tragic if the WHO, which plays such an important role in poor countries were to be starved of the funds it needs to combat this pandemic -or is it the case that those who think there are too many people in the world, think this is one way man has of 'thinning out his kind?'

[Stavros]

https://twitter.com/PoliticsJOE_UK/s...98158395150337

Never liked the original, but the cover version packs a punch!

[KnightHawk 2.0]

This report says the the Trump administration buried CDC guidelines that were supposed to be issued on safe reopening of the economy. https://apnews.com/7a00d5fba3249e573d2ead4bd323a4d4

These charts show why it's clearly premature to be declaring victory.

Not surprised at all that the Trump Administration buried the CDC Guidelines that was supposed to be issue on how to reopen the economy safely. This latest move shows how far they're willing to go to bury science and facts that doesn't sound good to them,and pretend that everything is fine even though it isn't.

[Fitzcarraldo]

https://www.gq.com/story/kushner-too-much-testing

Excerpt:

At one of Donald Trump's press conferences this week, he appeared with a banner behind him proclaiming in all caps that "AMERICA LEADS THE WORLD IN TESTING." It was an obvious lie—the U.S. lags far behind other countries that have managed to get their coronavirus outbreaks under control, like Denmark, Germany, and New Zealand.

But despite swaths of the country shutting down for two months, the U.S. is still basically where it was when the pandemic started in terms of testing, and experts say that there's no realistic way to return to normal without doubling or tripling the number of tests administered every day. That's nowhere near as optimistic as White House adviser Jared Kushner was when he told Fox News that the administration's response was "a great success story" and the country will "be back to normal" and "really rocking again" by July.

Kushner, it turns out, is reportedly one of the people directly responsible for the country's extreme delays in rolling out tests when the outbreak started. That's according to the Financial Times, which recently published a deep-dive into the Trump administration's chaotic and denial-plagued coronavirus response. One of Donald Trump's confidants, who's regularly in touch with the president, put the blame squarely on Kushner, saying, "Jared had been arguing that testing too many people, or ordering too many ventilators, would spook the markets and so we just shouldn’t do it. That advice worked far more powerfully on [Trump] than what the scientists were saying. He thinks they always exaggerate."

[trish]

Mission accomplished

[Fitzcarraldo]

Gotta wonder if he's telling the truth about this:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/19/polit...rus/index.html