Author Topic: Can there be some balance in the discussion?  (Read 2763 times)

Perd Hapley

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Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« on: March 30, 2020, 06:02:49 PM »
I think this is a political discussion, so here we are.

First, some perspective.

Quote
An 86-year-old woman has died after reportedly being punched in the face at a Brooklyn hospital by another patient for apparently not properly “social distancing.”
source

https://www.usnews.com/news/economy/articles/2020-03-19/unemployment-spikes-33-amid-coronavirus-pandemic

Quote
More people died of suicide in a single Tennessee county last week than of the coronavirus across the entire state, according to one local official.

Knox County Regional Forensic Center examined nine suspected suicides in under 48 hours last week, Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs said, according to the Tennessee Star.

"Is what we are doing now really the best approach? How can we respond to COVID-19 in a way that keeps our economy intact, keeps people employed, and empowers our people with a feeling of hope and optimism, not desperation and despair?” Jacobs asked.
source

The three notes above are in addition to everything else we can expect from a severe and sudden economic downturn - poverty, crime, domestic violence, family break-ups, and no doubt many other things I've not thought of yet.

So is it OK to balance our concern over the China virus (hospitalizations and deaths) with our concern over those who'll be hurt by, or won't even survive, the social distance depression? Or the sort of panic that causes someone to physically attack an old lady? It seems as if any suggestion that the cure might be worse than the disease is met with one (or both) of two standard responses. Viz, "you care more about money than people," and "you think this is all a hoax." Or, if neither of those satisfy, there's the "are you volunteering to be one of the people that's going to die?" approach.

It's a little odd, because the argument that people can be hurt, or can die, as a secondary effect of economic hardship is pretty familiar to us by now.
« Last Edit: March 31, 2020, 12:45:41 PM by fistful »
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grampster

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #1 on: March 30, 2020, 06:29:54 PM »
It would be a blessing if the media just reported actual factual events and occurrences instead of speculating about stuff they know nothing about.  Example:  A middle aged state legislator from around Detroit died yesterday or today.  The media reported his death, as it would be of interest to people in his district, but at the same time interjected that they didn't know why he died but it might have been because of the Wuhan Virus because he went to the hospital with breathing problems.  A picture of the guy showed him to be of the serious burly persuasion.  For all they know he died of a heart attack.  The point being is that if they don't know, don't speculate.

In my view, this disease may be a plague like problem.  I'll be willing to bet we'll never actually know.  But the media has been nearly hysterical in the reporting of it.  They pantingly report the #s infected and how many died today.  They do not report how many survived today.  Last time I checked the death rate in the US was around 0.016.  It's likely lower than that because there are hundreds of thousands of people who are likely infected and either have a mild reaction or no reaction at all but have been infected, thus not reported.

It would also be rather nice if the media gave Trump a thank you for how he is handling this with respect to who he surrounds himself with and what they do.  Love him or hate him, with Trump being a billionaire CEO in the private sector who also had to deal with bureaucrats, he knows how to delegate and also knows how to organize and react to stuff.  In other words, he's qualified to deal with situations like this.  As I say, watch what they do, not what and how they say it.  He may not know diddley squat about disease, but as an experience businessman, he does know how to organize and pick people to do what needs to be done. I shudder to think what we'd be facing if all we had were lifelong politicians managing something they know nothing about as they have never been managers only hand shakers.  

Every article that I read generally starts off with a slap at Trump.  Then if you read the rest of the article you find out that things are working fairly well under the circumstances...those circumstances being that the .fed gov and the states are woefully under prepared for a situation like this.  Because past administrations at the .fedgov level and state level were not doing their due diligence regarding being prepared for a pandemic situation, why should Trump get the blame?  In fact after the H1N1 situation in Obama's administration, much of the federal stockpile of needed stuff did not get replaced. Bush II didn't do anything either about being prepared.

Why should the government be prepared?  Well that is actually a simple answer.  Millions of people travel all over the world all day, every day.  They go to and fro from 3rd and 4th world locations ran by tribalist, dictators, communists, and quasi-democracies every day.  The health and sanitation levels are pitiful in many of those places.  It stands to reason that with those circumstances pandemics will occur with a fairly certain regularity.  Thus we should be prepared for it with other methods than destroying the economic health of, well, every country in the world.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2020, 07:13:24 PM by grampster »
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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #2 on: March 30, 2020, 08:12:35 PM »
It would be a blessing if the media just reported actual factual events and occurrences instead of speculating about stuff they know nothing about.  Example:  A middle aged state legislator from around Detroit died yesterday or today.  The media reported his death, as it would be of interest to people in his district, but at the same time interjected that they didn't know why he died but it might have been because of the Wuhan Virus because he went to the hospital with breathing problems.  A picture of the guy showed him to be of the serious burly persuasion.  For all they know he died of a heart attack.  The point being is that if they don't know, don't speculate.

In my view, this disease may be a plague like problem.  I'll be willing to bet we'll never actually know.  But the media has been nearly hysterical in the reporting of it.  They pantingly report the #s infected and how many died today.  They do not report how many survived today.  Last time I checked the death rate in the US was around 0.016.  It's likely lower than that because there are hundreds of thousands of people who are likely infected and either have a mild reaction or no reaction at all but have been infected, thus not reported.

It would also be rather nice if the media gave Trump a thank you for how he is handling this with respect to who he surrounds himself with and what they do.  Love him or hate him, with Trump being a billionaire CEO in the private sector who also had to deal with bureaucrats, he knows how to delegate and also knows how to organize and react to stuff.  In other words, he's qualified to deal with situations like this.  As I say, watch what they do, not what and how they say it.  He may not know diddley squat about disease, but as an experience businessman, he does know how to organize and pick people to do what needs to be done. I shudder to think what we'd be facing if all we had were lifelong politicians managing something they know nothing about as they have never been managers only hand shakers.  

Every article that I read generally starts off with a slap at Trump.  Then if you read the rest of the article you find out that things are working fairly well under the circumstances...those circumstances being that the .fed gov and the states are woefully under prepared for a situation like this.  Because past administrations at the .fedgov level and state level were not doing their due diligence regarding being prepared for a pandemic situation, why should Trump get the blame?  In fact after the H1N1 situation in Obama's administration, much of the federal stockpile of needed stuff did not get replaced. Bush II didn't do anything either about being prepared.

Why should the government be prepared?  Well that is actually a simple answer.  Millions of people travel all over the world all day, every day.  They go to and fro from 3rd and 4th world locations ran by tribalist, dictators, communists, and quasi-democracies every day.  The health and sanitation levels are pitiful in many of those places.  It stands to reason that with those circumstances pandemics will occur with a fairly certain regularity.  Thus we should be prepared for it with other methods than destroying the economic health of, well, every country in the world.

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #3 on: March 30, 2020, 08:22:40 PM »

In my view, this disease may be a plague like problem.  I'll be willing to bet we'll never actually know.  But the media has been nearly hysterical in the reporting of it.  They pantingly report the #s infected and how many died today.  They do not report how many survived today.  Last time I checked the death rate in the US was around 0.016.  It's likely lower than that because there are hundreds of thousands of people who are likely infected and either have a mild reaction or no reaction at all but have been infected, thus not reported.


They also do not report the number of people who have recovered. I read an article over the weekend (possibly a link I found here on APS, but I confess that I don't recall) that discussed the fact that we are dealing with incomplete data, and therefore nobody can make "informed" decisions. I have been complaining about this to my state senator and representative for two weeks or more about this. Our useless governor provides a daily update, in which he spells out the number of new cases, the number of hospitalizations, the total number of cases, the number of new deaths, and the total number of deaths. What's missing is the number of recoveries, and without that number we have no handle on the number of actual, active cases.

A friend who works in a hospital IT department gave me the link to a Johns Hopkins web site that tracks COVID-19. For the U.S., it's broken down to the county level, and it includes a data point for recoveries.

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

But ... there are zero recoveries for my entire state. Spot checking around the country, even in Seattle, the original hotspot, there are no reported recoveries. Yet we know (or we have been told) that people have recovered. So why isn't it being reported, so we can have a more accurate assessment of the number of active cases? It finally occurred to me that the way to determine if someone has recovered -- completely -- is to test them. But we have been (and still are) so short on testing capacity that we can't even test all the prospective cases. There's no testing capacity left to check people we already know have it. Consequently, we have no data (or, at best, VERY incomplete data) on the number of active cases in the U.S.

So how the [bleep] can any planning be done?
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MechAg94

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #4 on: March 30, 2020, 10:04:11 PM »
They also have no idea how many people picked it up but never had significant symptoms so never reported it. 
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RoadKingLarry

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #5 on: March 30, 2020, 10:43:32 PM »
It is my understanding that to be "recovered" a person has to have 2 successive negative test results. I suspect that a lot of the testing for "recovered" isn't getting done. They had it, they got better, they are no longer a priority.
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Hawkmoon

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #6 on: March 31, 2020, 12:48:19 AM »
It is my understanding that to be "recovered" a person has to have 2 successive negative test results. I suspect that a lot of the testing for "recovered" isn't getting done. They had it, they got better, they are no longer a priority.

Exactly. And from a short-term, deal with the crisis now basis, that makes sense. Unfortunately, the consequence for long-term (and even intermediate-term) planning, the result is a complete lack of an important data point. How can you project how many active cases we'll be dealing with if the key metric for determining the number of active cases isn't being tracked?
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Jamisjockey

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #7 on: March 31, 2020, 08:16:31 AM »
People are crazy. 
JD

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #8 on: March 31, 2020, 10:35:56 AM »
It's not necessarily a "pick one or the other" situation.
the best way to limit economic damage would be to listen to the public health experts’ advice about how to limit infections — including by continued dramatic social distancing measures.
...
It is an elementary confusion to believe that lost growth and lost jobs are primarily a consequence of social distancing measures rather than the pandemic itself.
...
Saving lives and saving the economy are not in conflict right now; we will hasten the return to robust economic activity by taking steps to stem the spread of the virus and save lives.
In the moral, catatonic stupor America finds itself in today it is only disagreement we seek, and the more virulent that disagreement, the better.

Perd Hapley

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #9 on: March 31, 2020, 12:48:22 PM »
It's not necessarily a "pick one or the other" situation.

Exactly.
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Perd Hapley

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #10 on: March 31, 2020, 01:03:42 PM »
https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/30/how-shutting-down-the-economy-much-longer-could-kill-tens-of-thousands-of-americans/

This guy has been looking at the numbers. I think some of you might appreciate it.
https://ricochet.com/737251/coronavirus-update-through-3-28-2020/

That website has a public and private side, and only articles that get sufficient upvotes are public.* I'm a subscriber, so I'm not sure how many of his articles are outside the paywall.


*Unless you're one o' them "Contributors" or super-delegates, or whatever they call the special people that get to post right on the public side whenever.
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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #11 on: April 02, 2020, 06:22:13 AM »
My advice? Carry a cane. If ya can poke them with the tip, they are too dang close!
I might not last very long or be very effective but I'll be a real pain in the ass for a minute!
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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #12 on: April 02, 2020, 08:20:14 AM »
Correct steps taken early and fast would have quite possibly saved our economy a lot of heartbreak.  You'd have isolated outbreaks that would be controlled.
How have South Korea and Japan managed theirs so easily?
Aggressive testing, isolating of the sick, aggressive contact tracing and quarantines.
Instead, the US shut off travel from China, but we were allowing travel from Iran and Italy?
And the lack of tests....absolute failure.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/china-concealed-extent-of-virus-outbreak-u-s-intelligence-says
China's potential shenanigans makes judging our response even harder.

JD

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #13 on: April 02, 2020, 08:34:15 AM »

How have South Korea and Japan managed theirs so easily?
Aggressive testing, isolating of the sick, aggressive contact tracing and quarantines.

Note that works in part due not to government, but to culture. Imagine the outcry here if Trump ordered the surveillance and other "totalitarian" edicts these two countries did. Things have worked there (as far as we know) because the populations fell in line with government edicts without putting up a fuss about rights and freedom. Which you could look at as good or bad.
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Jamisjockey

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #14 on: April 02, 2020, 08:38:51 AM »
Note that works in part due not to government, but to culture. Imagine the outcry here if Trump ordered the surveillance and other "totalitarian" edicts these two countries did. Things have worked there (as far as we know) because the populations fell in line with government edicts without putting up a fuss about rights and freedom. Which you could look at as good or bad.

Which will instead end up further eroding our group rights as a people.
JD

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #15 on: April 02, 2020, 08:46:21 AM »
Which will instead end up further eroding our group rights as a people.


I don't know how these things work in the two mentioned countries. They may (both gov and people) be able to easily switch from temporary full on Big Brother to "normal" as needed. Unfortunately here, once we give up a right, it stays that way. TSA for example. You wouldn't get much of an argument from me that what we put in place immediately post 9/11 made sense for the very short term, even if it was inconvenient or temporarily stomped on rights. But of course almost twenty years later it's all still in place, "for our safety".
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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #16 on: April 02, 2020, 01:15:18 PM »
I don't know how these things work in the two mentioned countries. They may (both gov and people) be able to easily switch from temporary full on Big Brother to "normal" as needed.

This is a couple weeks old now but it's a good explanation of South Korea's legal authority
https://www.lawfareblog.com/lessons-america-how-south-korean-authorities-used-law-fight-coronavirus
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Perd Hapley

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #17 on: April 02, 2020, 02:20:34 PM »
Correct steps taken early and fast would have quite possibly saved our economy a lot of heartbreak.  You'd have isolated outbreaks that would be controlled.
How have South Korea and Japan managed theirs so easily?
Aggressive testing, isolating of the sick, aggressive contact tracing and quarantines.
Instead, the US shut off travel from China, but we were allowing travel from Iran and Italy?
And the lack of tests....absolute failure.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/china-concealed-extent-of-virus-outbreak-u-s-intelligence-says
China's potential shenanigans makes judging our response even harder.



So no balance from you, then.
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MechAg94

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #18 on: April 02, 2020, 04:25:18 PM »
Correct steps taken early and fast would have quite possibly saved our economy a lot of heartbreak.  You'd have isolated outbreaks that would be controlled.
How have South Korea and Japan managed theirs so easily?
Aggressive testing, isolating of the sick, aggressive contact tracing and quarantines.
Instead, the US shut off travel from China, but we were allowing travel from Iran and Italy?
And the lack of tests....absolute failure.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/china-concealed-extent-of-virus-outbreak-u-s-intelligence-says
China's potential shenanigans makes judging our response even harder.



I heard Rush talking about the difference between New York and California right now.  Probably more facets of this issue to look at. 
“It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.”  ― Calvin Coolidge

grampster

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #19 on: April 02, 2020, 11:40:50 PM »
I just caught a little bit of Rush today.  He had some interesting comments about capitalism and  Kali.  Gov. Comrade Newsome is now publicly stating that now is the time to implement "Progressive" policies going forward.  He said that capitalism is bad...we need the new Progressive Capitalism.  I always love how the wealthy aholes want to push agendas that have no effect on them. :facepalm:
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zxcvbob

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #20 on: April 03, 2020, 10:34:52 PM »
My dad flips the channels between MSNBC and CNN all evening; occasionally putting it on Fox News for a few minutes (I guess for balance)  Hours of that crap every night.  I watched a little of it tonight, and I started the wonder why MSNBC especially doesn't just come right out and tell the viewers to assassinate you know who.  Everything they says is framed around, "He's a menace to us all!!"

About 10 minutes of it was all I could stand.
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Pb

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #21 on: April 04, 2020, 11:06:45 AM »
My dad flips the channels between MSNBC and CNN all evening; occasionally putting it on Fox News for a few minutes (I guess for balance)  Hours of that crap every night.  I watched a little of it tonight, and I started the wonder why MSNBC especially doesn't just come right out and tell the viewers to assassinate you know who.  Everything they says is framed around, "He's a menace to us all!!"

About 10 minutes of it was all I could stand.

Why would  you watch any of it?   ???

grampster

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #22 on: April 04, 2020, 11:26:57 AM »
Why would  you watch any of it?   ???

Even worse than that is there are a few million Americans who believe and applaud that dreck.
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zxcvbob

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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #23 on: April 04, 2020, 11:35:04 AM »
Why would  you watch any of it?   ???

To see what Dad was watching.
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Re: Can there be some balance in the discussion?
« Reply #24 on: April 04, 2020, 06:54:18 PM »
Even worse than that is there are a few million Americans who believe and applaud that dreck.

I read recently that 63% of Americans still get their news from the MSM.  That would certainly imply some level of belief.
It's not like other news sources are hard to come by, what with the interwebs and all.
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Conservatives see George Orwell's "1984" as a cautionary tale.  Progressives view it as a "how to" manual.

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Liberals believe one should never let reason, logic and facts get in the way of a good emotional argument.