That's it. That's the post.
Sorry, Cumol. It's a shit situation, I know. The only takeaway I have from the past three and a half months is that if you're going back into lockdown, a hard lockdown, with all the inconvenience that entails, is much more effective at bringing this thing under control and enabling things to reopen sooner. That and ignore the naysayers and tabloids that try to break social cohesion and exploit the situation to sow mistrust in public institutions.
Yeah, a lockdown will work it out no doubt. But you can also feel that the attitude towards it is changing, specially from the your generation.
And honestly, I understand that. I feel it on myself. I am lucky I live in a flat share, otherwise I would be a miserable case of oxytocin deprivation. But going another half year without physical contact will fuck up a lot of people (me included).
buys a weighted blanket
Agreed. I think there were more tears of relief wept than cheers of triumph when the Premier announced the lifting of restrictions yesterday.
The past few months have been very, very hard.
Not states, but I guess counties? Large cities and the surroundings.
Basically this interactive map:
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/coronavirus-karte-deutschland-101.html
Everything in red passed the 50/100k per week mark and is considered a risk area. Those with above 100 are in a higher "level" of risk with more rules.
You know that's actually reassuring. I'd sort of gotten used to being in a third world country since March but it kind of looks like the good parts of the US are kind of like the good parts of Europe at this point.
https://coronavirus.wa.gov/what-you-need-know/covid-19-risk-assessment-dashboard
We're at 57 right now which sucks but being able to consider yourself a peer of Germany kicks the shit out of having to compare yourself to Australia or (gasp) North Fucking Dakota.
https://www.health.nd.gov/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/north-dakota-coronavirus-cases
Fuckin' 760 cases per 100k, dawg. "Be legendary!"
Except those numbers are dumb, and not really tied to anything in particular. Know how Google will throw the first search result it thinks is decent up at you when you search so that you don't feel like you need to click on anything? It actually does a really shit job of that when it doesn't have the context that it so desperately needs, and nobody is doing "context" with COVID (they're doing North Dakota things like lopping a zero off). If I look up "zamak 2 casting temperature" on Google it'll tell me 2600f because there's a site that is stupidly wrong. Zamak 2 melts at 900f, that's why you make carburetors out of it. 2600f is somewhere awkward between gold and platinum and in any event is about 500f hotter than home furnaces will go which is good because otherwise I'd be out there making iridescent zinc gas.
The statistic WA state uses for openings and closings is cases/100k, 2-week rolling average. Thus, that data can't be scraped easily by Google or anyone else. Thus, the number I care about is "121.9 and skyrocketing"
while Google is at "9.1 and dropping." Which, looking at the data, was where we were May 29th. And if Google is comparing May data and October data (presuming Belgium is updated within the past 20 days), Google isn't doing anyone any favors.
Fair enough, they're dumb for WA because WA uses a dumb public metric. We have pretty decent daily case reporting, so it's actually accurate on that map. My region is 61 on Gmaps and 62 on the governmental dashboard.
Other than that the map is just Johns Hopkins and NYT data repackaged, and since nobody does this shit any better than mediocre, it's unfortunately the best international comparison we got. Which is different from what you might need to inform yourself, but is what the original question here was.
Here's my point: Google is scraping the easiest data and calling it final. You're arguing that my source is dumb - it's not, they report the 7-day, too, which Google also gets wrong. I know they're wrong for where I'm at because I care a lot and I know that JH and the NYT don't agree with UW don't agree with WHO don't agree with FT and if Google is using "today data" for Belgium and "May data" for parts of the US then Google's map is worse than useless. Mediocre times mediocre is mediocre squared, not doubly mediocre.
Yeah that's the truly frustrating thing. I don't think there is one. I probably wouldn't care so much if I wasn't dealing with my county, my state and UW all dealing with the same data (at some level) and all reporting different shit.
I lean into FT from time to time, but that's probably more to do with the fact that they were the first ones to put international data together in a legible fashion, and they call out underreported deaths more. I check NYT for the same reason - their visualizations are better. I don't think their data is necessarily good but I don't think anyone's is.
The disunity around COVID is one of the most discouraging things I've ever seen. I watched an interview with Sanjay Gupta last night on Colbert. He pointed out that accounting for population, COVID in the US is exactly as fatal, at exactly the same speed, as the 1918 pandemic. It's like we've learned NOTHING.
NYT had one of those mini docs yesterday where they were like, "You know what's fucked up? The fact that all the places where they've been able to control covid they're basically following the protocols that were developed in the USA by the CDC and partners." So, yeah, we learned how to lead the horse to water all right. Getting him to drink has been a heavier lift, to put it mildly.
I firmly believe that Trump would be sailing to re-election at a 90% approval if, in the middle of the Democratic debates, he'd said "fuck all that we got a crisis y'all have to do what I say to save lives" and then proceeded to dictate a semi-coherent response. He could even be looting the shit out of the process, steering massive amounts of largess and payola to his cronies, nationalizing the Proud Boys as "coronavirus response militia" or some shit and stomp on minorities because their infection rate is so high.
He could be exactly the goose-stepping, venal nazi he is, only he'd be getting away with it, if he'd actually just gotten out of the way, let the medical establishment take care of things and then taken credit for any successes.
Intelligence literally came to him and said "here's a one-month head start on the issue that will define your presidency, how do you want to take advantage of it" and he said "I don't."
If he hadn't kicked Steve Bannon to the curb years ago we'd be looking at like a fifth Trump term.
The good part about the data in the link is that you're nowhere near capacity for hospital covid admissions.
The morons around me have pushed my county's counts from like 38 in the summer to 127 in the most recent 14 day span, although that's pretty good by MI standards, because it looks like some rural counties are pushing 1,000. And I can assure you that those counties do not have hospital capacity.
Our idiot neighbor voted to rescind their mask mandate in two counties and may have to start using our excess hospital capacity.
Yeah on a grading-on-the-curve, we're-still-American-after-all level we aren't doing terribly up here. I can point to three restaurants that will never open again not because everyone is bankrupt but because their owners died of COVID but considering how many bloody senior living apartments they've put up in the past two years this place should be a goddamn bloodbath. What's appalling is when you look at our county heatmaps all the cases are coming from the unincorporated I-5 corridor, where mask laws are enforced by the sheriff we're recalling.
"we aren't Utah" is... better than "we're Utah" I guess.
Except for Utah, the state-level hot spots (per capita positive tests) currently look like a heatmap of "Americans guess which state hosts Sturgisfest". Texas is slowly starting to creep up, but it's mostly driven by El Paso, I would guess, they're transporting patients to elsewhere in the state.
Trump is probably going into superfuckyou mode after the election, regardless of how or when the electoral college is tallied. Any coronavirus testing legislation will be vetoed, so I'd guess our only hope is a GOP Senate override. Hahahhaha. If Trump hasn't conceded to a massively-expanded testing and tracing program by now, he's never gonna. And Trump actually is pretty much the Senate, at least until he loses the election and probably takes the Senate with him. Still, that's not until the end of the year.
His anti-testing tendencies, along with promoting/demonstrating a disregard for masks, reckless super-spreading events, and the politicization of his own covid contraction, are unacceptable. To pretend that scientifically sound policies and economic stability are diametrically opposed is the one of the most damaging "false choice" logical fallacies in... well, at least maybe a year or two.
Counterpoint: If Trump is resoundingly defeated, he could just get out of the way? But I sincerely doubt it. I dunno, it'd be interesting if the election was squarely called for Biden by 1 or 2 AM EST. I expect it to take days. :(
Almost typed EDT, looking forward to gettin' the hour back, yeeeee.
UPDATE: Retail restrictions finally end tomorrow 11.59pmAEST. It's been a long, long winter.
I love how you guys have zero new cases and you're all limiting shit to ten people and insisting on masks. Any US city with zero new cases would pass an emergency "lick every third stranger" rule and institute celebratory slip'n'slide and twister competitions.
Honestly, I'm fairly sure a mandatory mass orgy in Federation Square to celebrate the end of lockdown is not off the cards.
A key distinction down here is that the states are entitled to close their borders to each other (something Australians had forgotten for the past hundred years). Consequently Victoria was locked out of the rest of the country by the other states, who had all successfully brought case numbers under control. We've had to get it to zero before the other states will even talk about reopening. That and we all want to be able to fly out to New Zealand and the Pacific Islands over the summer.
Yeah we had some of that. Like Vermont and New Hampshire turning away NY driver licenses and shit. Nothing you can do about interstate travel, though, you're right.
I think a more important distinction is you aren't led by a populist who has formed a death cult around himself that confuses risky behavior with bravery and patriotism while destroying any central response and sowing discord. Morrison isn't gonna go "yeah so you guys are on fire? Too fucking bad no emergency aid for you since you won't vote for me." Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you guys even have a structure that would permit that.
We don't have Trump and things would be a lot worse if we'd had Trump. We've had no shortage of Murdoch and the yellow press sowing discord and destroying social cohesion, though. Look up #nobeersfornewscorp on twitter and you'll see what I mean.
The real leader during all of this has been Dan Andrews (the Premier, sort of like your Governor). The leadership throughout this has come from the states first and the Commonwealth Government a distant second. It says something about Scott Morrison's leadership that he has yet to come out and congratulate Victorians on what they've achieved.