COVID-19 Update

The numbers are taking on a kinda of wave affect - a fluctuation in the growth rates that could indicate a stubbornness about this thing.

And in an additional wrinkle to the disturbing tendencies of the American ISIS, we have a report of what promises to be a series of incidents of vigilante assholes "defending" themselves during the apocalypse which they're promoting and propagating through their own idiotic behavior.

This is early enough to predate the COVID-19 explosion, but there're facets of it that raise some very troubling thoughts. ie: with the culture of violence so deeply-seated in the American psyche, how hard is it going to be to get a force of Brown-Shirts going - if in fact we're not already seeing it, but still unable to recognize it because its existence is being denied officially almost every day.

WaPo:

A Georgia prosecutor on Tuesday said a grand jury should review the fatal shooting of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, who was killed in February after being chased by two armed men who told police he looked like a burglary suspect.

The lack of charges thus far has enraged advocates across the country, who have expressed deep frustration with both the shooting of the unarmed man and how the case has been handled.

News around Arbery’s killing reverberated Tuesday after a graphic video that appeared to depict the shooting went viral on social media. Lee Merritt, the family’s attorney, shared the video Tuesday afternoon and said Arbery’s family was forced to watch for the first time online.

“Mr. Arbery had not committed any crime and there was no reason for these men to believe they had the right to stop him with weapons or to use deadly force in furtherance of their unlawful attempted stop,” Merritt wrote in a statement. “This is murder.”

This country is sick - and the FUBAR situation with COVID-19 is only the latest physical aspect of it. 

Our biggest problem is that we have a national mental illness which starts with deliberate ignorance - which leads to a generalized gullibility - which makes for easier political manipulation - which can rapidly manifest itself in gun violence.

There are disturbing parallels with Tim Wise's Divide-n-Conquer lessons.

What better way to keep the populace in line than to set one demographic against another?

Fast And Loose

...and dumb and wrong.

NYT "explains" it all:

The People (P): What is happening?

Answer (A): A virus has come.

P: Is it dangerous?

A: Very dangerous. But not dangerous to most. It strikes the elderly most viciously. But it can kill the middle-aged, the young, the thin, the healthy.

P: What should we do?

A: Stay away from others. Stay inside.

P: And then we won’t get the virus?

A: Absolutely you will get it. Everyone will get it.

P: Wait. No one told us this. They’re telling us to stay inside and we won’t get it.

A: Well, I’m telling you now. Almost everyone will get it. Seventy percent of you, give or take. Think about it. It’s everywhere, and there’s no vaccine. But we want everyone to get it at different times. Like on a schedule of getting it. At least five million people already have it in the United States.

P: Wait. Five million? Everyone says one million.

A: That’s the known, confirmed cases. We just started testing in earnest like, an hour ago. For every case we know, there’s five, 10, 50 that we don’t know. Maybe they got it and were asymptomatic. Maybe they got sick but not sick enough to go the hospital or get tested. Five million is an extremely low estimate of how many cases there are. It’s probably more like 20 million.

P: Twenty?

A: That’s good news! In a way. That means it’s less deadly to most people than we thought. And it proves the inevitability of you getting it yourself. So stay inside till it’s your turn to get it.

P: How long should we stay inside?

A: I’m thinking two months. No, three. Six? No, 12. Yes, 12!

P: Then it will be gone?

A: The virus? Lord no. It could be 18 months till we get a vaccine. But by then you’ll have already gotten it, so the date doesn’t really matter. Especially given that the virus will come back double-strong in the fall.

P: So it’s less potent in the summer?

A: Absolutely not. Who told you that?

P: You just said it’ll come back stronger in the fall. Which implies its power is dissipated in the summer.

A: Are you a doctor? No? Good. Then pay attention. The virus is everywhere, in every city and state, but we’re flattening the curve. Then it’ll very likely come back with a vengeance in the fall. Winter, too. Also, in the meantime, it’ll be with us all summer with probably no change in its potency. Capiche?

P: No one’s giving us this information.

A: Well, you know how we’re stretching out the cases over a longer period of time? Flattening the curve? We’re also flattening the truth. So just stay inside, and you’ll be fine. Order stuff online. Support your local restaurant.

P: Whew. OK. We can do that.

A: But do so knowing that you are putting the lives of everyone at risk — the cooks, the clerks, the delivery people. I’m actually a bit shocked by your selfishness and the cavalier way you’re sacrificing the lives of people who have no choice but to expose themselves to grave danger during a pandemic.

P: It sounds like you’re saying we shouldn’t order stuff to be delivered.

A: You shouldn’t. Unless you want local businesses to die.

P: So we should support local businesses …

A: Absolutely. While risking their workers’ lives. Yes. Order food, eat it, watch the news about the pandemic that can’t be stopped. Get plenty of sleep, and start smoking. Turns out smokers are less likely to get sick. Which only makes sense! So remember to exercise. Go for a run!

P: Where should we go for a run?

A: Ideally some place where you can spread out, where you aren’t in close proximity to other people.

P: Like the beach? A park?

A: Sure. Beaches and parks are wide-open spaces. They’re about as safe as you can be.

P: We just went to the beach and the park. There were hundreds of other people there.

A: You went to the beach? The park? What were you thinking? There are hundreds of people there! Go home. Be with your kids. Do you have kids?

P: Yes.

A: Well, make sure they keep up with school. Keep up with their worksheets and Zoom, and check their work, and keep them off screens, and go outside, and don’t worry about school. It’s a pandemic, after all.

P: Um. Many of the things you just said sound contradictory.

A: Not at all. I’ll rephrase: Your kids are living through a crisis. It’s all right if they feel anxious, or if you can’t maintain routines or keep up with regular school schedules. Just make sure they don’t fall behind, and remember that kids thrive on routine. So stick to a schedule, but give them space, and stay inside, and go outside, and use technology to connect with teachers and friends, and limit screen time.

P: Wait. So …

A: But enjoy some downtime together! Relax and watch a movie. Cook some food! Just don’t go to the stores, because that’s dangerous to everyone. Order in! But don’t. Stay home. Move to the country. And stay in the city. If you get sick, go to the hospital. But don’t get too sick, because you wouldn’t want to be going to one of those hospitals now! They’re full of sick people!

P: When did you say this would all end again?

A: Eighteen months. That said, the soonest we’ve ever come up with a vaccine was four years.

P: But everyone’s talking about reopening stores and everything now. How does that square with 18 months?

A: That’s easy. People will die.

P: Wait. What?

A: Oh sure. So many more. Oceans of people. Even just 1,500 a day for eighteen months means 800,000 in the U.S. alone will die from this virus. That’s what the Minnesota scientist says. Osterholm. He’s one of the foremost experts in the world. He’s been right every step of the way so far.

P: What? 800,000?

A: That’s if things stay more or less steady. It could be higher, much higher. With the easing of restrictions and all.

P: But isn’t the rate of death declining?

A: Friday was one of the deadliest days yet! And that’s after everyone’s been inside for a month. Once everyone goes back to work, it’ll probably go up significantly. Total blood bath.

P: So why are we easing restrictions?

A: Something something the economy?

P: Excuse me?

A: Mumble mumble the economy maybe?

P: We don’t understand.

A: Listen. People are fatigued. They want to go back to work. They want to shop. More than anything, they want to roll balls toward white pins and make loud bang-bang sound. And then possibly end up with a tube inserted in their trachea, helping them breathe while their lungs cease to function, until they almost invariably die and die alone.

P: Why don’t we just freeze the economy? Just close most businesses and have the government give everyone a living wage while we wait until there’s a vaccine?

A: Hmm. First of all, ridiculous. Second, that would take significant coordination between local, state and federal governments.

P: Can we do that?

A: Well. I don’t know … I mean … OK. For starters, we’d need superadvanced ways to coordinate everyone. We’d certainly need phones. Maybe email. We might even need spreadsheets and/or computers.

P: Do we have all those things?

A: I think we … might? But there are still so many questions. Like, how would we know who to give money to? We’d have to have a national database with all the salaries of all the nation’s workers.

P: Don’t we have that? Seems like we could get that.

A: Here’s another plan: We promise money to pretty much every person and every business. We give this money to maybe half the people, and to a very small percentage of businesses. We let big banks control most of this money meant for small businesses, and the big banks can funnel it to their biggest clients.

P: That sounds terrible.

A: Those big banks sure know how to handle cash!

P: It seems it would just be easier to give people the exact salaries they had before they lost their jobs to one of the deadliest viruses in 100 years. Just freeze everything. Just mutually agree to pause, together, so we don’t have to lose 730,000 more souls.

A: First of all: boring. Where’s the intrigue? The drama? With our system, you have wave after wave of unemployment, with no end in sight. Every week brings something new: business closures, bankruptcies and ruptures of the supply chain — a never-ending, cascading, domino-orgy of lost savings, empty storefronts and shattered dreams. That’s much more exciting than some boring old guaranteed income that would allow everyone to simply ride out the pandemic knowing their jobs and businesses would be there when the virus was defeated.

P: So there’s no plan.

A: Having no plan is the plan! Haven’t you been listening? Plans are for commies and the Danish. Here we do it fast and loose and dumb and wrong, and occasionally we have a man who manufactures pillows come to the White House to show the president encouraging texts. It all works! Eighteen months, 800,000 deaths, no plan, states bidding against states for medicine and equipment, you’re on your own, plans are lame.

P: I’m going to lie down. I don’t feel good.

A: Should we sing a patriotic song? I feel like our forebears would be so proud of us now. It’s just like how we all pulled together in World War II, every element of society, from the White House to Rosie the Riveter, with common purpose and shared sacrifice. This is just like that, except instead of coordination, we have competition, and instead of common cause, we have acrimony and chaos. Instead of fireside chats, F.D.R. and Churchill, we have tweets, Lysol and Ron DeSantis. Other than that, it’s exactly the same.

Today's Pix

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COVID-19 Update

People have been wondering about getting back to normal. And, what will "the new normal" look like?

First, the old normal was kinda shitty - people more or less chained to a job because they can't afford to lose their healthcare insurance. People being unable to afford a fairly simple emergency that costs more than a few hundred dollars. No sick time. No vacation time. A pay structure that sets out the daily requirement for throughput, at a fixed pay rate, which means you almost never get it all done, which means your hourly rate is less than it says it is on your check stub, which means there's always month left over at the end of the money.

So, for most people, "getting back to normal" is more like a threat than a promise.

And until the smart people come up with a vaccine, or some workable therapeutics, we're already in "the new normal" - this is it, folks.

Anyway, Growth Rates are hangin' in there at about 1.02.

I'll go out on a limb and say that the DumFux News crowd will see enough of a downturn in that growth rate, and take to heart President Stoopid's daily pronouncements of what a great job he's done, and what a great victory he's engineered for the American people because of his superb leadership and blah blah blah - and we'll go charging into the sinkhole, guaranteeing a second wave in the fall.

That, of course, is the conventional wisdom, and while there's no good reason to believe otherwise, we're flying blind - we don't know near enough about COVID-19 to be making any solid predictions.

And there's the rub. The rubes continue to accept a string of logical fallacies (Straw Man, Ad Hominem, Argument From Ignorance, False Dichotomy - you name it, these idiots will swallow it) as the basis for their support of a guy whose only talent is that he knows how to milk the Dunning-Kruger effect, and to take it a step or two farther by persuading stupid people that their stupidity is what makes them smart.

NYT Morning (in my email) - David Leonhardt:

Most countries with severe coronavirus outbreaks have come well down from their peak in new cases each day. It’s happened in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Turkey and, if you believe the official numbers, China.

But it has not happened in the United States. Here, the number of both confirmed new cases and deaths has fallen only slightly in the last few weeks. Every day since April 2, there have been at least 22,000 new cases and 1,000 deaths.

Now, with many states preparing to reopen their economies, the toll is likely to start rising again, according to a private Trump administration forecast obtained by The Times. It projected about 3,000 deaths per day on June 1.

Why has the United States failed to bring down its caseload as much as most other countries?

The answer isn’t completely clear, given the complexity of the virus. But the leading suspect, many experts say, is the uneven nature of the U.S. response — like the shortage of tests so far and the mixed approach to social distancing.

“The problem with the American response is that it’s so haphazard,” Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told me.

One way to see the pattern is to look at the U.S. caseload outside the New York metro area. New York has been hit harder than any other city in the world, thanks to its large number of foreign visitors, its high population density and a slow initial response from its political leaders.

But New York has since engaged in fairly rigorous social distancing, and its caseload trend looks like that of a European country: up and then down.

The story is different in the rest of the country. Outside of the New York region, the caseload still has not peaked:

Coach

"Shula's that guy who can take his and beat yours in the first half, and then take yours and beat his in the second half."

- Bum Phillips

Don Shula, January 4, 1930 - May 4, 2020

SI:

Hall of Fame Dolphins coach Don Shula died Monday morning at his home at age 90, the team confirmed.

"Don Shula was the patriarch of the Miami Dolphins for 50 years. He brought the winning edge to our franchise and put the Dolphins and the city of Miami in the national sports scene," the Dolphins said in a statement.

1972 Dolphins - the only undefeated season in NFL history

COVID-19 Update

I don't have any great expectations that we'll do much of anything to "fix" what we all know is wrong with an economic system that's so totally dependent on Consumer Demand.

Still, there's always reason to hope.

Happy Nerd Day

Todays' Tweet

Redneck Wright Brothers - are we finally gonna get our flying cars?

pic.twitter.com/6KsfJMP2lo

— because men live less (@menlivesless) April 8, 2020

COVID-19 Update

see: Worldometer Coronavirus Update

100,000 dead Americans by about May 18th - it's good news whenever that date recedes, even a little.

But the fear now of course is that Americans are getting bored with it, and too many are resisting the urge to stay cautious, so they're heading out to celebrate the good weather - which could trigger a second wave.

The Hill:

The U.S. saw its largest one-day death toll from the coronavirus pandemic to date on Thursday, as several states began to reopen parts of their economies.

According to data from the World Health Organization, 2,909 U.S. residents died on Thursday, shattering the previous record of 2,471 deaths that were reported on April 23, CNBC reports.

The grim news comes as Americans grow weary of the stay-at-home measures that have shuttered businesses and put millions of people out of work. State leaders around the country continued to see protests from demonstrators who want to reopen the economy and return to their jobs. Demonstrations took place in California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Tennessee and Washington on Friday.

Reuters:

The Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus has coalesced in recent days around the same message - the need to reopen quickly. The White House did not renew federal guidelines on social distancing that expired April 30, and President Donald Trump is expected to go to Arizona next week, after a month without travel.

Just as the virus has infected the states unevenly, some state and local governments are opening malls, movie theaters and hairdressers while others remain in the stay-at-home posture that at one point kept most of America’s 320 million people indoors.

Both the White House and the groups advising it are missing detailed, centralized plans for virus testing and containment, which many health officials, historians, and economists say are needed to avoid a new surge of infections and longer-term economic damage.

A Harvard University study published last week argued that 5 million tests per day by early June would be needed to deliver a “safe social reopening.” Such testing would need to ramp up to 20 million a day to fully remobilize the economy, the researchers said.

Arguing With Idiots