Covid-19 Politics

[fred41]

What's the point of doing contact tracing if you can't ask the person where they have been and/or who they have seen.

You’re right it’s absolutely ridiculous. I’m assuming you’re talking about policy such as this:
https://nypost.com/2020/06/15/corona...nded-protests/

I’m assuming the protests, even though they’re held outside, will have an affect, especially since people are often shoulder to shoulder and often screaming without masks. If this turns out to be true, we deserve to know, because it will play into statistics used by medical authorities.

[broncofan]

The incubation period for the virus is on average five days. There's a lot of variation and it can be much longer. If it averages five days then some people will have an incubation period shorter than that. I'm a bit surprised that in Pittsburgh, which is in Allegheny County, we haven't had an uptick at all and it's been long enough for at least some cases to show up. Random factoid: during the 1918 Flu Pandemic, Pittsburgh had the highest number of deaths per capita of any other city. We're doing much better during covid and the other day had 7 new cases in a county with 1.2 million people.

I agree with Fred and Blackchubby. I understand some people are paranoid about the way statistics and electronic data on their whereabouts can invade their privacy. The privacy invasion of telling health authorities where you've been after you get sick is really minimal. Protesters are not going to be put on lists or subject to surveillance for protesting police brutality and it's very important data.

Health authorities are still trying to figure out what kinds of events are super spreader events, whether being outdoors mitigates some of the danger of being close to other people. It's essential information and with very little risk of misuse. Once again, De Blasio is faced with a pretty easy decision and gets it wrong while trying to prove some point. This is a guy who really shouldn't be in charge of anything...

[broncofan]

And I'm not trying to jump on the anti-De Blasio bandwagon because everyone in NYC thinks he sucks. Every decision he makes is like this. This isn't even a close call is it?

[blackchubby38]

The incubation period for the virus is on average five days. There's a lot of variation and it can be much longer. If it averages five days then some people will have an incubation period shorter than that. I'm a bit surprised that in Pittsburgh, which is in Allegheny County, we haven't had an uptick at all and it's been long enough for at least some cases to show up. Random factoid: during the 1918 Flu Pandemic, Pittsburgh had the highest number of deaths per capita of any other city. We're doing much better during covid and the other day had 7 new cases in a county with 1.2 million people.

I agree with Fred and Blackchubby. I understand some people are paranoid about the way statistics and electronic data on their whereabouts can invade their privacy. The privacy invasion of telling health authorities where you've been after you get sick is really minimal. Protesters are not going to be put on lists or subject to surveillance for protesting police brutality and it's very important data.

Health authorities are still trying to figure out what kinds of events are super spreader events, whether being outdoors mitigates some of the danger of being close to other people. It's essential information and with very little risk of misuse. Once again, De Blasio is faced with a pretty easy decision and gets it wrong while trying to prove some point. This is a guy who really shouldn't be in charge of anything...

And lets be perfectly honest about something:

Once we all agreed that we were going to shut down the country, let governments decide who was an essential worker/business and who/what wasn't, issue stay at home orders, made wearing a mask mandatory in public, instituted curfews, fired tear gas at protesters, etc. all for the greater good, we basically said we were okay with giving up some of our rights and liberties.

Why should telling a contact tracer in order to keep track of the pandemic be any different.

[broncofan]

I'm not discounting the role local politicians can have in preventing Covid outbreaks, but there is some randomness about the timing and severity of outbreaks. Early on, NYC had one of the worst regional outbreaks in the country while much of the South was spared. Now we're seeing Florida, Arizona, and Texas have enormous spikes in cases.

The one common denominator is that we have a federal government that has decided to portray public health as a liberal concern. It's understandable that people would want shutdowns to be lifted along with improvements in case numbers but is there any reason we don't have bipartisan, nearly unanimous support for mask-wearing?

I read from one epidemiologist that significant compliance with mask-wearing in public can bring R0 to close to 1 or below 1 by itself. The President refuses to wear a mask despite the fact that he's not similarly situated to others. Everyone around him gets tested, he forces others to wear a mask around him, but doesn't lead by example.

There are some on the far right, like literal militia nuts and Ron and Rand Paul, who think requiring people to wear masks during a pandemic violates the Constitution, but I don't know of any Constitutional scholar who has argued as much. Maybe we can Alan Dershowitz to say a thing or two about this tyrannical, yet so far mostly voluntary request that is both reasonable and life-saving.

I see a toll in human life that is completely avoidable and involves no trade-off at all and don't understand how others aren't bothered by it. When Florida has 3000 new cases in a day, you know that means given our cfr that about 150 will end up dying?

[blackchubby38]

And I'm not trying to jump on the anti-De Blasio bandwagon because everyone in NYC thinks he sucks. Every decision he makes is like this. This isn't even a close call is it?

The one thing that can make a crisis worse is poor leadership. De Blasio falls into category.

Deblasio has found himself between a rock and hard place. He is a progressive that initially got himself elected because he promised he was going to end "stop and frisk" and reform the NYPD. The relationship between him and the department was fractured from the beginning. There was the infamous incident where cops turned their back on him when he visited two of them in the hospital after they had been shot in the line of duty.

Fast forward to the events that took place in the wake of George Floyd's death. While I don't condone all of the actions of the NYPD during the riots and looting, I understand them. Deblasio apparently felt the same way and even defended some of their actions in his press conferences. Which led people who can be considered his supporters to criticize him and even complain that he hadn't done enough when it came to the reforming the NYPD. In a twisted case of deja vu, at an event honoring Floyd, people turned their back on Deblasio when he started speaking.

I think that's why he issued the mandate about contact tracers not being able to ask people if they were at a protest rally. He is trying to get some credibility back with his base. Even though it flies against everything he championed when he was talking about combating Corona-virus.

[holzz]

https://www.businessinsider.com/coro...20-6?r=US&IR=T

This man is a wasteman.
His "little flu" is fucking up his country.

I wonder whyhe hate LGBT peopel so much. I reckon at Rio Carnival, he hooked up with some guy and he got turned down since he didn't douche and the guy didn't want shit on his dick. No other reason. A lot of homophobic politicians tend to be down low gay anyhow. Some trans escort should snoop out a story saying he blew her or she topped him.

[Stavros]

Gathering together up to 20,000 people at the Tulsa rally must be an opportunity to test them, and if free of the virus to track them back to the place they came from, and monitor them in case they fall ill with it, and then trace the people they have been in contact with, in order to assess the impact of the rallly. Oklahoma is one of the States where cases are rising on a daily basis, so if they can't stop the trally, they should at least monitor its impact on public health.

[blackchubby38]

Gathering together up to 20,000 people at the Tulsa rally must be an opportunity to test them, and if free of the virus to track them back to the place they came from, and monitor them in case they fall ill with it, and then trace the people they have been in contact with, in order to assess the impact of the rallly. Oklahoma is one of the States where cases are rising on a daily basis, so if they can't stop the trally, they should at least monitor its impact on public health.

Actually it was closer to 6,200 people. So it shouldn't be that hard to test and trace them.

[Stavros]

Millions watched online streaming, Millions. As for Tulsa, attendees would have been close to a million had Patriotic Americans not been intimidated and threatened by a phalanx of Leftists, Ultra-Leftists, Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, Posadists -never forget the Posadists-, Anarchists, Anarcho-Syndicalists, Muslims, and of course, the Black Panthers. Or maybe that's fake news.

Meanwhile, Covid-19 cases in Oklahoma continue to rise each day...and that's not a joke.