Blood on the street II

The Mullica Hill Amish farmers market has the best donuts on the planet! About 50 varieties. Try it!

Tabasco is missing out on a golden opportunity and be socially responsible at the same time:

Had a dream last night about my favorite masseuse. She has a nice set of enhanced D's.

I feel semi-delirious lately with things out of my control.

Yeah, no doubt about that. [/s]

It is amazing to me that, after this whole shitstorm, how some of you can't stop kissing China's ass. I guess if the KoolAid is on the table, some people can't help but drink it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ack-under-lockdown-after-infection-re-emerges

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopoliti...defective-covid-19-fighting-medical-equipment

More below, and I could go on. So, yeah -- a little sick and tired of hearing from some of you how great and enlightened China is. And once again, not blaming the Chinese people, just the Chicom government.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/us/politics/cia-coronavirus-china.html

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-china-trail-leading-back-to-wuhan-labs/

It’s not shocking to me that you cant understand the difference between having an open view about whats really going on in China, and the story your media and our government want you to believe. Damage control is in full swing now, from both countries. US government is trying to blame China to cover up the awful job they’ve done, and China is trying to move past who started this, paint a picture of rosy health, and an effective responsive humanitarian country. At the government level it’s bullshit on both sides.


You drank your version of the koolaid long ago. You must have spa friends in China. Talk to them, see what they say.

Sure there’s going to be hot spots, but the point really is that you can get back close to normal after this.

And yet you keep parroting the Chicom line on these boards. Pretty sure I am not singing the praises of the US Government response. In fact, I am skeptical about a lot of things regarding CV-19 and the nature of our response. But, at this point, I am along for the ride whether I want to be or not.

You can say specifically me. I don’t care. I wont complain. But I also won’t be responding anymore.

My thoughts are my own. I don’t trust the Chinese media, the usa media or either government. At this point I talk to real people to figure out what’s going on.

I've said from the beginning the numbers were under-reported. And I can back that up, because the posts are still there. We had no choice but to use those numbers, because we had no other data. Just as your argument that the real mortality rate is lower than current data, anyone could have built in whatever buffers to have that data match their sense of what should be real world data. However, you can't argue that China under-reported the numbers and then say those numbers are what led you to think this crisis was not as dangerous. Because the simple fact is the numbers reported pointed to a very infectious virus, that made a lot of people extremely sick. Even if you questioned the mortality rate, the strain on the medical system was there for all to see. Worse, is ignoring the highly infectious factor. I have no doubt that played into the decision for the CDC to delay testing. And that delay is why we currently have the highest positive infection numbers compared to the rest of the world. No amount of kool-aid is going to change that failure of response.

I don’t trust the numbers from China. But I also don’t believe that 21 million people died. I don’t trust the numbers in the USA. I know of nursing homes are not reporting or even testing elderly patients. They don’t even classify them as presumptive positive, as they are afraid it will spread panic.

The numbers we have are just reference points. The dark side of my brain thinks delaying testing wasn’t incompetence as much as a defeatist attitude that everyone is going to get this anyway, let’s get it over faster. But the reality is likely we are just incompetent and cheap. We didn’t prepare, as Bill Gates said.

The official numbers from China were definitely under-reported. The numbers floating on social media is near impossible. I've said it before: the Chinese Govt kept two sets of numbers. The one they released to the world, and a real one that they used to coordinate the lockdown effort. There's no way they would have tried to fight this virus without knowing how bad it was. Some set of numbers scared them enough to cancel Chinese New Years.
Our numbers are only for those that have symptoms. The largest population of low and mild symptoms are being ignored. And even with that knowledge, and understanding the risk that those people can spread this virus further, we still don't have a Nationwide Shelter In Place order. If it wasn't for the State's response, not sure how much worse this could have gotten,
Whether defeatist attitude or simply optimism, not testing and not even trying to contain the virus at the beginning is the cause of where we are today. Letting it get over faster is the same as implementing Herd Immunity. I sincerely hope that's wasn't the thinking.
Big time. For those arguing States should have been better prepared, I'll say it again: States had surpluses ready. Those States that were hit the hardest used up those surpluses very quickly. The reason for the shortage is because they just can't get resupplied. And if the next argument is why didn't they get more in the first place, the answer is they followed the lead of the Federal Government indicating "it's not that serious". By the time it was deemed serious enough, there was nothing left to purchase. Nearly after three weeks of invoking the National Emergency Act, we still have frontline medical staff resorting to reusing, and having to be creative in making their own, PPE. While the DOD have invoked the DPA thousands of times in the past three years for their needs.

Thats the thing. We had Bill Gates, reports from China reports from people in the govt saying this may be a big deal. Who is definitely responsible from downplaying this also.

However this administration dropped the ball horribly. We look like a 3rd rate country how we are dealing with this.

Would you agree we are in dire straits?

The economic shoe has not dropped yet.

I knew we were in dire straits medically, when Seattle confirmed the virus was active for 6 weeks, and there was no escalation to this crisis back on Mar 1. Confirmed 2 days later when leading Pharmaceutical executives were asked if a super flu-shot would cure this virus.
I'm revising my retirement plans so that I can leave more money for my kids, and their kids, in my will. They're going to need it.

“However this administration dropped the ball horribly. We look like a 3rd rate country how we are dealing with this.”

It’s embarrassing how bad we look.

I would agree we are definitely in dire straights. I hate all the comparisons to WW II. With the continued inept bumbling and lies. Endless lies it’s more like Vietnam. Of the politicians want to compare this to a war, they should compare it to Vietnam.

Unfortunately, until we get some magic bullet (vaccine, cure, etc.) we are faced with a bunch of Hobson's choices. I think the nature of CV-19 guarantees it will be around until we get those things. And I think we are going to feel the economic impact of this for years. There simply is not enough $$ to fix everything that is or is going to get broken. I don't think our current response is economically sustainable.

It's easy to do MM quarterbacking on this and say we should have done this or that. But in the real word there are many kinds of constraints, including bureaucracy, economics and politics. Also, information is never perfect.

A lot of people point to places that have done better at fighting CV-19. But most of those places have homogenous populations, more authoritarian governments and are islands, either geographically (Japan), politically (South Korea) or both (Taiwan). Comparing us to them is like comparing apples to oranges. In the US and Europe, it was probably inevitable that we would get it pretty bad given our open economy and freedom of movement. And, as I pointed out before, Americans are a diverse, rebellious bunch who often flout the rules. We see that every day and, yeah, it does not help.

I've already acknowledge that a vaccine is our best shot at this point. As for the money, it didn't need to be this bad, so it didn't need to be that expensive. Tackling a bigger problem than you need to always costs more.

This isn't MM Quarterbacking. I've been arguing my point since the beginning. I'm now in the unfortunate position of being more accurate with my projections of what could happen.

Well, if we had those deficiencies going in, we should have planned harder, or at the very least started sooner.

Yeah, if only everyone had listened to YOU. LOL

However, the actual situation is that the President and Governors probably have a lot of SMART, RENOUND experts advising them on what to do. But experts don't always agree, even when information is perfect. And when information isn't perfect, they are even less likely to agree. Just look at the recent debate on use of face masks. The CDC was supposed to be the agency that planned for a possible pandemic. And, despite the billions of $$ they no doubt had, the response still fell short. Would more $$ have fixed the problem? Just like throwing money at public education, I would guess the answer is no.

And, even when you do give people direction, there are always glitches, like we saw with the production of the CV-19 tests.

I am not excusing our shortcomings, but I am not surprised or shocked either. Having lived/worked in the real-world I know that there are always flies-in-the-ointment and headwinds to getting anything done. And, on top of all we've seen so far, there is no doubt more fun & surprises yet to come. As von Clausewitz noted: No plan survives contact with the enemy.

I guess you missed the point I've already made several times: my position mirrored those of the medical community. I just voiced them here. You are giving me way too much credit.

We'll have to agree to disagree. The President doesn't have the right experts around him. He was set on being optimistic, and we know what happens to those who disagree with him. Even if experts don't agree, in a case of a pandemic, you plan for the worse. Cost wise, you make a safe investment, so it's not wasted if you turned out wrong. But it would have been more effective than what this Administration did, and that is nothing.

Glitches happen. I can live with glitches. And one more time, because you keep forgetting. The issue isn't the glitches. The issue was not using a working backup. Which meant they didn't think testing was a high enough priority, Bad decision then. Bad decision now. Someone will be blamed for it.

Yeah. But going by what you posted in the beginning, I think you're also very casually forgetting the details. For someone that argued the flu was more dangerous, you couldn't have been proven more wrong.