NY, NJ, PA, CT, and MA have 53% of cases. It’s time to stop treating this like every state or region is in the same situation.
Edit: Some people apparently need to be reminded that Europe is a place. Individual countries are reopening as they see fit based on how they are handling the virus. It honestly is starting to feel like some people prefer the pain than the idea of safely reopening certain states and regions.
Italy was the first western country to be hit with COVID.
Italy is also not the richest country with the highest per capita ICU bed availability with a ridiculously expensive healthcare system which while terrible for general welfare was excellently places for an emergency like the pandemic.
And if California shut down too early, it was still not a bad decision because you did not know what a good decision was at the time.
The fundamental problem in the US has not been shutdowns. It’s been shutdowns which have involved absolutely no planning for the reopenings.
That’s the fundamental disaster in the US handling of the situation. The northeast could maybe be forgiven for not doing planning for reopening because they were actually dealing with a crisis during the shutdown. But the rest of the country had no excuse. And unlike the northeast they weren’t the first to be hit, so they had time to see and prepare.
Instead, they declared it a Northeast problem as if the virus could tell Jersey Shore residents from South beach residents, and decided to go on with their lives without any planning or preparation anyways.
I'd love to be in a situation with some recent outbreaks and hotspots instead of it being the entire country. Or even if New Jersey was free. Or even one city.
The only reason it's apples-to-oranges is this continued belief that America is somehow special. This has caused all countermeasures to be ineffectual, half-assed, and incomplete.
The problem with the US right now, is that people are simply not getting tested. There are reports of people who traveled outside of US and are showing symptoms yet they are being refused the tests.
The White House has been trying to downplay the whole issue. I understand that any administration would have a hard time handling this but Trump has been doing terrible job, even going as far as naming it a hoax.
In the next 30 days we will see exponential growth of the virus in the US. We have 330 million people but only 1 million hospital beds. Many older folks will not receive treatment.
The way US healthcare is set up will make this issue even worse. In US many people avoid doctors and hospitals due to cost. Many HAVE to go to work because they don't have savings and don't have ANY time off. US is set up perfectly for the virus to spread like wild fire. Plus, many Americans are still ignoring the pandemic. This will not end well for the US.
This is crazy. There is nothing any party could do to have prevented the virus from reaching the United States, aside from a complete shutdown of the borders, including for American citizens. It is too transmissible, too undetectable, etc, to prevent it. Containment is the only feasible option, and America is actually ahead of the curve. Unlike Italy and France and Europe, American states are shutting down before hospitals have yet to be overrun.
Denmark completely shut its borders.
Austria has made everyone wear masks, and have been shutdown for a long time.
US states like Mississippi are still arguing that everyone should be essential.
There are at 11 states with double the number of confirmed cases as Denmark, and I don't see any of them actually slowing down currently. They're all experiencing 4 times more daily cases than Denmark.
Europe has twice the population of the United States.
Yet despite this, United States has 4 TIMES the cases per day.
Europe can relax because they worked hard in the beginning to get everything under control. The US never did that, most states (like my home state of Texas) did a half-assed closing for 3 weeks, so the numbers never really got under control.
While that may be true and could only really be resolved by testing 100% of the population please do show me another democratic, developed and wealthy country where systematic massaging of facts and numbers is so widespread.
You may have a number of conservative talking heads in the UK yelling for reopening, but in no other place I know of the virus is actually a partisan issue.
One of the reasons, in my book, why the US response is so terrible compared to just about every other rich country.
This is sort of where I've ended up as well. Many other countries have taken incremental reopening steps already. Some states have as well, and despite it being over 2 weeks, there hasn't been a spike in cases in those areas yet (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa/so...). Some countries also never issued a strict shelter in place order in the first place. And I don't mean just Sweden. For example, per IHME data, none of the Scandanavian countries ever issued orders that met their definition for a "stay at home" order.
There is no avoiding reopening. General availability of vaccines will take a very long time, simply because manufacturing 1 billion of anything is nontrivial. It is simply not feasible to ask people to put aside their personal lives and business for 18-24 months. We can do so reasonably safely with clear common sense guidance, without vacillation on the effectiveness of masks or distance or precautions.
In the least we need to stop issuing blanket orders that apply over broad geographies like entire states. The risks are different for different people and different circumstances. For instance, the infection fatality rate (IFR) is so low (less than 0.1%) for those under 50 that they should be permitted to go about their business. I am very much in favor of individuals assessing the risks to themselves in choosing which activities they participate in. From https://reason.com/2020/04/15/people-not-politicians-will-de...:
> Who has the best information to weigh these risks, the costs and benefits of each trip out versus staying home? Not a governor or a president, but an individual. Different people may have different tolerances for risk. For some people that trip to a restaurant or a place of worship may be a risk worth taking. For others it is not. For sure, each individual decision can affect other people—one person who takes too much risk and gets sick means one fewer hospital slot available for someone else. But that is true in many areas of American life, and it hasn't until now caused the country or states to be locked down.
AFAIK the US isn't faring particularly worse than most European countries. Especially if you remove New York, the perception of the US as having had uniquely bad outcomes seem pretty unfounded. And if you focus on individual states, states like California responded very early and have absurdly low cases per capita.
Now try Italy or South Korea. Germany still has twice as many cases as the US, and 7.5x as many cases per million of population (12.1 vs 1.6 CPM in the US). Proximity to Italy doesn't do them any favors. To their credit though, they have zero deaths.
If you order the stats by cases per million, the US comes in 40th, so containment doesn't suck too bad, compared to others. By deaths it's the 5th though - the main cluster basically took out a bunch of very old, medically problematic folks at a senior care facility. As the officials from the facility said, about 7 people die there per month under the normal circumstances, but this month they were additionally hit with the coronavirus. Bad luck.
I live in the Azores on an island with less than 15k people which was mostly closed last year. There are only two ways to enter the island: the port and the airport there isn't a lot of movement and everyone coming in is tested twice. On top of that people here are terrified of the virus and take it very seriously (masks, distancing, etc) and can even be hostile to newcomers.
Still, cases keep popping up even without systematic testing. There are no deaths or even ICU cases but the virus keeps finding its way in. I believe that, like New Zealand, we are just postponing the inevitable.
It seems like you're really underestimating the severity of the situation
I implore you to read up on what the situation in Italy is like at this moment, and to look into why the Danish government just declared Denmark in lockdown mode.
Denmark went from 30 diagnosed cases to over 500 in 5 days. This is with an aggressive testing protocol that includes tracking, testing and quarantining every person each new case has been in contact with.
To think that the US with their limited and delayed testing is at anywhere below 20000 actual infections by now seems extremely optimistic
Everyone will get sick -at the same time-. That's a really really big deal
The US is a big place, more akin to the entire EU than any one European country. Certain regions and states in the US have handled Covid much better than certain regions and states in the EU, and vice versa.
But on aggregate, Europe and the US have both massively bungled their Covid responses.
Other countries (mine included) are in almost complete shutdown, with only super markets and pharmacies open. Any other place where people congregate (schools, night clubs, cinemas, cafeterias, restaurants) are closed. This is with fewer than 200 cases country-wide, and it's still probably not going to be enough.
We don’t even know what “cases” really means. So many people have been infected and not tested by this point. It is estimated over 200k have been infected in the USA and have not required medical help or felt symptoms.
Italy has had a more rapid and intense breakout coupled with a vulnerable population and social customs that spread things more quickly.
I’m not British but their strategy of lock away the weak (old people and other vulnerable) and let the young/healthy take the brunt and burn the virus out is pretty smart. Unless in reinfected of course.
Edit: Some people apparently need to be reminded that Europe is a place. Individual countries are reopening as they see fit based on how they are handling the virus. It honestly is starting to feel like some people prefer the pain than the idea of safely reopening certain states and regions.
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