The Harris/Biden Administration: Coming Together to Build Back Better
- Thread starter HFrog1999
- Start date
HFrog1999
Member
Officer husband of slain Uvalde teacher tried to save her. His gun was taken away.
The officer tried to storm the school after his wife, Eva Mireles, called him to say she had been shot, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety said. He was detained.
www.nbcnews.com
AroundWorldFrog
Full Member
"Dignity"
KillerFrog InD KitchenSink
Active Member
Some honest, trying to be respectful thoughts on your post.
Thought #1- If we can’t isolate the at risk now, what evidence is there to think we could done that effectively early in the pandemic? We’ve basically proven that isolating the at risk is impossible with a virus as infectious as Covid. It’s going to get to everyone if we allow for organic spread.
Thought #2- I get the distrust of Government, but if not Government to lead a response, then who? Since a pandemic affects us all, some sort of coordinated response is necessary, no? I think decentralized response with mixed messages and inconsistent approaches is going to have worse outcomes than a flawed centralized one. I do think a take home point is to allow for vigorous debate about the approach. Squelching alternative viewpoints is never right. But at some point some sort of buck stops here entity has to come up with official recommendations during a pandemic.
Thought 3- The biggest issue I have with an early back to normal approach is the impact of high level spread on hospital capacity, supplies and overwhelming care personnel. Opening the spigot full bore and having NYC and Northern Italy like spread everywhere all at once would have overwhelmed the system. It would have been catastrophic. We had no testing, no treatments, no vaccine. It was touch and go as is during the first few surges Mortality would have been much higher and not just from Covid- all other diseases would be negatively impacted.
Again, once we got through the delta wave, after plenty of time to distribute the vaccine, develop better therapeutics and had upped testing and support capacity I think there is a good argument that was the time to “let virus be virus”. I do agree there now are individuals and governments that are holding onto pandemic mentality too long now though.
Cheers!
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Bob Sugar
Active Member
Then we need to spend a [ #2020 ] ton of money building thousands of USS Comforts to treat tens of patients. Maybe permanently create mass casualty wards in convention centers that treat no one. Or maybe your fears about hospital capacity have been overblown for two years.
froginmn
Full Member
It seems to me that your analysis would indicate that we did nothing wrong. If that's the case, rinse and repeat - no planning necessary!
I know I'm being glib and don't mean disrespect but that's what you wrote. And honestly I feel the government will approach it that way. At its heart, government is a bunch of bureaucrats. There are many well-intentioned employees as well and some "disrupters" who come in and make great changes, but despite changes in administrations, the bureaucrats remain and often end up in leadership roles because they're the ones who stay. And it doesn't really matter who is in the White House or State Capitol; government is a left-leaning, slow-moving bureaucracy that isn't very introspective.
That's not uncommon in corporations either, but the private sector has to have an "adapt or die" mentality that the government doesn't.
Back to the virus: what some of us said early on was that there was clear evidence very early that a significant portion of the population had little to no susceptibility to COVID. If we'd let it burn through those people while we more sufficiently quarantined the elderly, it's very possible that we would have shortened the peaks and reduced the transmissibility. It's very obvious that we could have kept kids in schools and kept businesses from failing. But the fear peddled (what about unknown long-term effects, what about MIS-C?) wasn't adaptation to the data, it was doubling down. Government doesn't learn, it seeks to reinforce what it believed while ignoring evidence. That's why I distrust it.
I'd like to learn something from what happened, yet the government is celebrating vaccinating 3 year olds.
KillerFrog InD KitchenSink
Active Member
Trust me (and I know you don’t!) they haven’t been, at least through the delta wave. I think the fears about the omicron wave stressing the system were overblown in retrospect. We had the treatment, community immunity (via vaccine and prior infection) and testing infrastructure built up by then to withstand that wave.
You like to bring up there USS comfort but remember that by the time (March 30) that it arrived people in NYC had been basically sheltering in place for 2 weeks (wait two weeks, lol!). I know the dogma around here is that physical distancing doesn’t work to stem spread but it definitely works. It obviously comes at a cost that must be weighed at different points in a pandemic but there is no doubt that limiting person to person contact limits spread of disease.
LVH
Active Member
California is still counting votes from their June 7 primaries. Meanwhile Florida, a state that is large with a lot of mail/absentee ballots, somehow can have 100% of their ballots counted within 1-2 hours of the polls closing.
Ineptitude may be an answer, but my opinion they are trying to normalize chaos when it comes to counting votes
Eight
Member
again, sounds great, but as pointed out how do you prepare for what you don't know what it is, how it spreads, the nature of it, and most importantly when it is coming?
stock up on ppe? draw up plans based upon what has happened in the past hoping future outbreaks will mirror the next?
heck, simply google the phrase "did sweden get it right" and look at the number of studies and articles that can't even come up with a simple consistence on that one country
you keep referencing nyc, but continue to fail to recognize that the simple geography and population density of nyc was far, far closer to italy than most of the cities in america and yet we saw a sweeping brush applied to areas that didn't have the same variables
uss comfort? go look and see how much was spent in harris county to outfit the convention center and then tell me how many individuals were treated there.
so much money was wasted, so many problems were caused by governmental actions, look no further than the nursing shortage caused by the federal government throwing money at a problem supposedly to help an overwhelmed nyc and others that resulted in hospitals and care facilities around the country losing staff because they could make ridiculous money as a travel nurse, therapists etc..often times in areas that didn't have covid outbreaks simply because systems were given federal money to spend on staff
you want to start with preparing for the next one, begin with having your experts not skewing their models to get their desired results and truly follow the science
HFrog1999
Member
The Governments of the World used Covid as an excuse for abusive and Tyrannical laws, mandates, lockdowns etc. They transferred a tremendous amount of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthiest. They erased our most basic rights, destroyed our wealth, inflated our currencies and killed an untold number of people in poor countries through the famine they created.
They can all go to Hell. The tyrants of the World need to be deposed
KillerFrog InD KitchenSink
Active Member
I definitely think things could have been done differently and better, mostly in the direction of points/ concepts that you make or have made in the past. But in a pandemic with a novel virus, someone has to be the buck stops here entity that issues recommendations and guidance and coordinates response based on the best available information. I don’t see any other way than Government leading that effort. I think the focus should be on making that effort better.
HFrog1999
Member
How about actual Doctors who treat Patients, not over paid bureaucrats who use pandemics as an opportunity to enrich themselves and consolidate power?
Why? Why does someone have to be the buck stops here entity?
Is "pandemic" some sort of magic threshold? And what if the virus really isn't that deadly? Someone on here said from the very beginning that they weren't going to worry about it unless young, healthy people start dropping. Which never happened. Not even close.
And spare me the "oh, the hospitals were overwhelmed" baloney. I know enough people in that field to know that the situations in the hospitals were sensationalized, because the people that work there said so. It was never as bad as they wanted you to think. Nobody can convince me otherwise.
Dogfrog
Active Member
Supreme Court Overturns NY's Concealed Carry Law, Expanding Gun Rights
In a 6-3 decision by the court’s conservative majority, the justices ruled that requiring people to demonstrate a particular need for carrying a gun in order to get a license to carry one in public violated the Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms.”
www.nbcnewyork.com
KillerFrog InD KitchenSink
Active Member
Because a disorganized, decentralized response leads to confusion and inconsistency. In any emergency, clear consistent messaging is key. People want that, businesses and institutions need that in order to make policies and procedures and individuals want that to guide behavior.
I definitely am not exaggerating the potential for overwhelming hospitals if we did nothing. The shutdowns in early 2020 saved the system from collapse. We did not have the capacity to withstand an open spigot approach to the virus. I do think it could be argued that we could have achieved similar outcomes with a shorter and less aggressive interventions though.
In that regard, I think it is important to remember that in the spectrum of covid response by all countries, the US was probably on the less aggressive side all in all.
AroundWorldFrog
Full Member
Com'n man, you know these people were overwhelmed. I know the occasions I had to work 100 hour weeks in my life (which happened a couple of times during an electronics factory build out) I didn't feel like doing [ #2020 ], much less dancing.
No, they didn't. That's speculative BS.
LVH
Active Member
I still to this day have absolute disdain for the dancing nurses. It was like a giant middle finger to everyone's face.
KillerFrog InD KitchenSink
Active Member
Yes, but any "how could we have responded differently" discussion is going to be speculative (including most of your assertions, btw). That's the nature of a look back. But we know the natural history of unchecked spread in NYC, Italy. I know that the dogma around here is that it only spread fast in those areas because of population density, but as we are seeing right now with the variants, respiratory diseases spread everywhere regardless of how densely populated a place is. The real key to how much as disease spreads is its R0 (how infectious it is in its baseline state) and Rt (how much it is spreads with interventions/ behavior change/ immunity). In the spring 2020, we got the Rt down below 1 (i.e. every person infected spreads it to less than one person and the peak goes down) because of our behavior changes which (IMO) prevented the overwhelming of the medical system.
