An update, and a sincere apology.

Kudos!

You are a smart and good guy. I knew you'd come around. You will come around on trump too, again.

You'll also not be the only one. We'll slowly see Trump fans reverting from "no big deal, just like the regular flu" to "the house is on fire panic".

Regarding the timing of the social distancing effort: For New York city, it started too late. Because the social distancing has a lag period of a few weeks, it should have started in NY city three weeks ago. They would be at a much better place now, had that happened. For more rural areas, now will be just fine. Those areas might not see a large wave of cases. Therefore, people in these areas are more prone to seeing the social distancing as overblown. Guess who voters in those rural areas overwhelmingly vote for?

 

Kudos to you Good Sir!

Also, the issue is less about how many will die, but more about how many will get sick and need medical attention. That's the main problem.

 

As with most things, I think the final solution will lie somewhere in the middle. Hopefully a short shut down with a VERY careful restart of important industry and slow ramping up over the next couple of months.

I can understand your worry of the impacts of a long shut down and why you were hesitant to support a flattening curve approach. Finding the right balance is difficult when dealing with an unknown, like Covid 19.

I'm hoping that we learn the lesson that preparing for more likely economic disasters from health crisis is more important than chasing guys in robes in caves in Afghanistan.

I also think that if we had a person in the White House who took a more measured and calm and trusting approach to governance, that we would have not been in the panic situation which made things far worse than they should have been. I'm going to point out that the H1N1 crisis was far more deadly - but did not engender the same panic as we have now. We trusted the government more in those days. We trusted our leaders more in those days. It makes a huge difference.

 

This month a total of 56 Americans died from Mar 1 - Mar 14, each day in the single digits. However, since then, there has been a pattern emerging that you are conveniently ignoring:

Date - Deaths
Mar 15 - 11
Mar 16 - 18
Mar 17 - 23
Mar 18 - 41
Mar 19 - 61
Mar 20 - 45
Mar 21 - 46
Mar 22 - 112
Mar 23 - 132

While for sure, the total figures are low now, the direction this pattern is going is unmistakable. The fact that over 1/2 of those deaths for this month have occurred within the last 3 days, and the fact that the entire total of 538 you mentioned is looking like it is going to be far below even 1/2 of the total for this month shows a disturbing lack of general knowledge or care to accurately represent facts.

So globally we are approaching 2000 deaths per day. We have another thread going where we track the total deaths and somewhat importantly, the % increase in cumulative deaths over the previous day's. For over a week now that has been going up over 10% (averaging somewhere over 12% right now, though still increasing). So assuming no changes, how long will it take before this coronavirus starts killing people more along the lines of your 155K figure per day? The math for that is pretty easy. Here are the results:

7days - 3.9K deaths per day
14days - 8.7K deaths per day
30days - 53K deaths per day
40days - 166K deaths per day

Keep in mind it takes some ~20 days for the virus to kill someone who actually contracts it. So to avoid that kind of figure at 40 days out, we have to see some kind of change at a global level within the next 20 days. It is this increasing slope that has people rightfully worried.

 

Better and more relatable way to put this

'If I give you 100 skittles, but tell you 3 of them will kill you, chances are good you aren't going to eat any'.

 

That's an excellent analogy. I was previously thinking to ask Trump fans if they would play Russian Roulette with a magazine of 100 that was randomly loaded with 3 bullets. Would they? ONLY 3% chance, right??

 

Great Opening Post @AmericanNationalist

Thank you for sharing it,
Zorro

 

And the reason you wouldn't eat any(or play Russian Roulette) is that the 1% chance is all you need. One bullet to the head does it. And in this case, it might be that one COVID-19 infection does it.

 

I think for most of the country we are nearing the peak of the curve but don't know it. We have Seasonal flu out there and we haven't caught up with the backlog of testing. Imagine watching the SARS pandemic in 2002-2003 exhaling when it's over and not making sure we have a testing infrastructure to match the challenge for the next pandemic. Imagine facing the swine flu that sickened 60 million Americans and killed 12,500 Americans in 2009 - 2010 alone, exhaling when it's over and not making sure we have a testing infrastructure to match the challenge for the next pandemic. Imagine watching the world face MERS in 2012 - 2013 exhaling when it's over and not making sure we have a testing infrastructure to match the challenge for the next pandemic. Thank goodness we have a business owner as President who doesn't think like a politician but faces down the challenges even if they will hit us in the future.

Getting back to your apology, most of the nation will be back to health. The threat will come from the left. Connecticut party goers who scattered to infect New England and the rest of the world, and New Yorkers escaping their epidemic to infect the rest of the East Coast and FL.

 

On what do you base this on, and can you link me to your source? I keep trying to find this evidenced in the numbers each day, yet all I can find are more deaths and more infections each day and at a faster rate than the last for pretty much every country I follow.

 

Yeah, the President has actually been very effective(so effective, they're reduced to soundbytes in criticizing the guy.) I look at action, and he took rapid action to get these people the help they need, as well as to advance medicine as quickly as possible.

Compared to the Democratic Nominee who looks absolutely lost, bewildered and has no chance at occupying the world's most prominent position.