Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember: FIRST: Eric Boehlert: ’What happens when you don’t have a truly delusional, right-wing party and media in your country: The Delta waves in the US and Canada, a striking contrast…
William Buckley may have been a toxic figure in US politics, but trying to tar him with an event that happened when he was just 11 is ridiculous. That is an age when one is not held responsible for one's actions and his motivations were likely far from the implied ones by Cotlar. What next, capturing a baby's laughter while in the background a cross is burning or a lynching happening?
When Re is greater than one, the difference between much greater than one and a little greater than one is how long you have to kiss your ass goodbye.
A mix of more (possibly) more effective vaccination (long waits, mixing vaccines), slightly higher vaccination rates, and a little more normalization of caution have had beneficial consequences, but until Re is reliably and continuously less than one this is not anything in the vicinity of success.
I think it's going to take another pile of corpses and another grim winter before the political consensus manages to shift into a recognition that resumption of the status quo ante pestis is not an available option.
Agree overall, but don't forget that keeping the R to as low a value as possible even if > 1 means you are saving lives by not overwhelming hospital facilities. Texas is the poster child for ignoring this and now is desperate for more medical staff and even beds to treat Covid patients, let alone those who need care for everything else - RTAs, non-elective surgeries, etc. There really ought to be a recall election on Abbott. Florida's governor is similarly culpable. Republican governors and legislators have not served the welfare of their citizens well at all, starting most obviously by resisting the ACA and refusing to expand Medicaid in their states. Covid is just the latest example, but with their own supporters most vulnerable. It will be most interesting to read about how these voters continue to support their Republican overlords when they have experienced a death of a friend or family member as a direct result of the callous response to Covid.
If R is greater than one, the hospitals will be overwhelmed. They may be overwhelmed slower -- through a more protracted grinding process of collapse, rather than any sudden fracture -- but they will be overwhelmed. Exponentiation is like that, and most people have absolutely no feel for it.
No significant number of people are going to change their politics over this. Absolutely anything is easier than admitting your identity axioms are in error, and so it has always proved that people find a reason not to change their axioms. Which is already widely observed in the US with the insistence that this naturally occurring zoonotic disease -- something that's been warned about as a significant risk since the 1980s at the latest -- is a literal communist plot. There, magic; the problem is the plot, and the evil people whose evil plot it is, not the freedom-loving republican governor who refused to succumb to the plot's demands to vaccinate people with mind-control magic.
It is likely that we'll see a whole lot more, and more violent, forms of what we are already seeing; direct attacks on health care providers to prevent anyone from being vaccinated.
"Holy" is that which must not be questioned, what cannot be questioned. The definition of holy is culturally dynamic, and it gets violent because holy profits someone, and they care very much about how it changes. Since the US as an empire is built on the confluence of several holinesses, all of which are inescapably false to fact (the shining city on a hill; the exceptional and specific love of god; the consequence-free utility of fossil carbon) this is likely to get messy. It will be less messy if someone can articulate a new holiness; it will be less messy still if someone can manage to produce a cohesive exercise of the civil power and start to insist on material facts as the sole legitimate basis of public policy.
If R0 = 1 + delta AND the doubling time >= to the disease progression time (infection to recovery/death) then the hospitals will not be overwhelmed. Yes there will be a grind that is dispiriting for the medical staff, and there will likely to a lot of collateral deaths from patients unable to be treated for their existing conditions, but the hospital system will not collapse. Of course, keeping the R0 at around 1 may be as difficult as tearing a piece of paper exactly in half.
The one good thing that could possibly come out of this is that many more Americans will be saddled with impossible medical debt and the demand for universal, tax-funded healthcare could become a reality.
The downside is that the irrationality of many US leaders is now fully exposed and yet a fraction of the population neither sees it, nor cares. This could be the end of the Republic, and the point where history marks the decline of the American Empire.
From the Guardian article by David Smith:
The crowd gathered under a tent at the water’s edge, their tables decorated with the Stars and Stripes and checked tablecloths. In their midst in Austin county, Texas, last Saturday was the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, laughing with delight and playing the fiddle.
With the coronavirus roaring through the state and hospitals near breaking point, comparisons with Nero fiddling while Rome burned were irresistible, although journalist Alisha Grauso pointed out on Twitter: “Nero actually enacted sweeping relief efforts to try to quell the fire and also offer his people aid in the aftermath, particularly the lower class, so Abbott is somehow worse than a Roman emperor known today as being a psychotic tyrant.”
William Buckley may have been a toxic figure in US politics, but trying to tar him with an event that happened when he was just 11 is ridiculous. That is an age when one is not held responsible for one's actions and his motivations were likely far from the implied ones by Cotlar. What next, capturing a baby's laughter while in the background a cross is burning or a lynching happening?
Apples. Trees. Don't fall far from. What we re taught we learn...
When Re is greater than one, the difference between much greater than one and a little greater than one is how long you have to kiss your ass goodbye.
A mix of more (possibly) more effective vaccination (long waits, mixing vaccines), slightly higher vaccination rates, and a little more normalization of caution have had beneficial consequences, but until Re is reliably and continuously less than one this is not anything in the vicinity of success.
I think it's going to take another pile of corpses and another grim winter before the political consensus manages to shift into a recognition that resumption of the status quo ante pestis is not an available option.
Agree overall, but don't forget that keeping the R to as low a value as possible even if > 1 means you are saving lives by not overwhelming hospital facilities. Texas is the poster child for ignoring this and now is desperate for more medical staff and even beds to treat Covid patients, let alone those who need care for everything else - RTAs, non-elective surgeries, etc. There really ought to be a recall election on Abbott. Florida's governor is similarly culpable. Republican governors and legislators have not served the welfare of their citizens well at all, starting most obviously by resisting the ACA and refusing to expand Medicaid in their states. Covid is just the latest example, but with their own supporters most vulnerable. It will be most interesting to read about how these voters continue to support their Republican overlords when they have experienced a death of a friend or family member as a direct result of the callous response to Covid.
If R is greater than one, the hospitals will be overwhelmed. They may be overwhelmed slower -- through a more protracted grinding process of collapse, rather than any sudden fracture -- but they will be overwhelmed. Exponentiation is like that, and most people have absolutely no feel for it.
No significant number of people are going to change their politics over this. Absolutely anything is easier than admitting your identity axioms are in error, and so it has always proved that people find a reason not to change their axioms. Which is already widely observed in the US with the insistence that this naturally occurring zoonotic disease -- something that's been warned about as a significant risk since the 1980s at the latest -- is a literal communist plot. There, magic; the problem is the plot, and the evil people whose evil plot it is, not the freedom-loving republican governor who refused to succumb to the plot's demands to vaccinate people with mind-control magic.
It is likely that we'll see a whole lot more, and more violent, forms of what we are already seeing; direct attacks on health care providers to prevent anyone from being vaccinated.
"Holy" is that which must not be questioned, what cannot be questioned. The definition of holy is culturally dynamic, and it gets violent because holy profits someone, and they care very much about how it changes. Since the US as an empire is built on the confluence of several holinesses, all of which are inescapably false to fact (the shining city on a hill; the exceptional and specific love of god; the consequence-free utility of fossil carbon) this is likely to get messy. It will be less messy if someone can articulate a new holiness; it will be less messy still if someone can manage to produce a cohesive exercise of the civil power and start to insist on material facts as the sole legitimate basis of public policy.
If R0 = 1 + delta AND the doubling time >= to the disease progression time (infection to recovery/death) then the hospitals will not be overwhelmed. Yes there will be a grind that is dispiriting for the medical staff, and there will likely to a lot of collateral deaths from patients unable to be treated for their existing conditions, but the hospital system will not collapse. Of course, keeping the R0 at around 1 may be as difficult as tearing a piece of paper exactly in half.
The one good thing that could possibly come out of this is that many more Americans will be saddled with impossible medical debt and the demand for universal, tax-funded healthcare could become a reality.
The downside is that the irrationality of many US leaders is now fully exposed and yet a fraction of the population neither sees it, nor cares. This could be the end of the Republic, and the point where history marks the decline of the American Empire.
From the Guardian article by David Smith:
The crowd gathered under a tent at the water’s edge, their tables decorated with the Stars and Stripes and checked tablecloths. In their midst in Austin county, Texas, last Saturday was the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, laughing with delight and playing the fiddle.
With the coronavirus roaring through the state and hospitals near breaking point, comparisons with Nero fiddling while Rome burned were irresistible, although journalist Alisha Grauso pointed out on Twitter: “Nero actually enacted sweeping relief efforts to try to quell the fire and also offer his people aid in the aftermath, particularly the lower class, so Abbott is somehow worse than a Roman emperor known today as being a psychotic tyrant.”