The article has some valid points. This was my favorite, "a middle-class life threatened on all sides by catastrophe."
That's exactly how it is in America. When it comes down to it, you're pretty much on your own. If it weren't for charities, donations and religious groups helping people, many Americans would be ruined.
Well, I have a plan of fasting and resting that will start the moment I feel a little sick.
If you're unlucky enough to have to go to the hospital, you won't die per se...
But, you might lose: your savings, your house, fall behind on bills. If you're lucky, you will burden your family for money, otherwise, you might live in a shelter for a while. Also, if you're very lucky, you might get some medical bills "forgiven" if you meet certain criteria (young enough, in school, has children, etc.)
> a top-down emphasis on productivity over humanity.
It's not top-down. I think this is a trap that people fall into. We are operating a massive distributed message passing system (the financial-political system) with no top-down authority any more. No one is in charge. We are _all_ King Louis XIV, sitting around waiting for the minions to deliver trinkets. Meanwhile the guillotine is on its way.
You might have forgotten in the last four years of "I don't take responsibility for anything" but the President is supposed to be that authority. Armed with the bully pulpit of being on every TV channel if he needs to be, armed with millions of people at his direct beck and call, with the tools of executive orders and being able to declare national emergencies.
Every other head of goverment has used some of these tools, even failures like Boris Johnson. That the US didn't is an indictment of the president and indirectly the US voter base.
What a horrible world this sort of thinking wants to build. Nearly everything in civilization balances safety with freedom. She wants to hold a grudge against large swaths of the population because she believes them not deserving of the freedom to make decisions about their own behavior.
Do we want to live in a society where
...every person driving a vehicle shares the blame for creating an environment where pedestrians get hit and killed?
...every person who refuses to wear a mask around people shares the blame for people dying from the flu?
...every person who engages in casual sex shares the blame for spreading deadly STIs like HIV?
...every person who might contribute to the depression of a child shares the blame for suicide?
COVID is a natural disaster, just like an earthquake or a hurricane. Lashing out at your political opponents helps no one, and no, it's not Trump's fault or his supporters' fault your family member died.
Some of the posting is so willfully ignorant, so incredibly left of field that the reasonable conclusion is that it's a few trolls (paid-for or not, that's not important) trying very hard to destabilise any normal discourse that might happen on the subject. It is this way with most global issues.
That doesn't really detract from your point on antisocial personalities, sadly. Trolls are also bad people. Perhaps they will be less surprising to you.
We're definitely in the era of the internet sociopath, people who engage in whatever the opposite of virtue signalling is (viciousness signalling?). They're quite happy to post how all sorts of people deserve to die.
But you're absolutely right. I'm baffled by how many people are eager to announce how much they hate people who never did them any harm, how people deserve misery and suffering, why it's fine to let thousands die.
In the past at least there was the pretense of morality, even if it was frequently hypocritical. Now it looks like all the hypocrisy is gone and all that's left is open hatred. I really hope this shocks enough people to turn it around.
Yes, she's right that her grandfather was 'sacrificed' for political gain.
By her.
I understand she is grieving but this is a confused mess trying to find something to blame. Trump. Voters. Capitalism.
Whatever might make her feel like her loved one's death wasn't entirely in vain. Whatever might stick. Whatever she wants an excuse to be more angry about.
She needs polite condolences and time. She doesn't need people indulging in this nonsense and encouraging her.
Basically, the people who politically lean the other way. Nowadays the debate has become so toxic that "the other side" will be against whatever your side wants, just because it's what your side wants.
How about on an administration that had all the information back when it was first spreading from China?
People like you seem to have forgotten "It's a liberal hoax." Remember New Orleans saying "If the administration had told us how bad Covid was, we would have skipped Mardi Gras." Remember Austin fighting with SXSW to get them to cancel?
The Trump administration had the data and buried it. And then later stoked the "outgroup" against those who attempted to apply more significant shutdowns.
Inaction at the beginning of a pandemic leads to an inability to contain it later. South Korea, Vietnam, etc. shows what happens when you take it seriously early.
So, yeah, I do lay a significant chunk of unnecessary deaths on the "outgroup" as you call them.
And I'm not going to allow people like you to get away with revisionist history.
If someone drops a match in a dry field and a fire starts, and then I stand posturing saying "Don't worry, I've got this, the fire is under control", while trying to not be noticed as I stamp little patches of it with my feet, and as the fire grows I say "I've got it, it's diminishing" while still not doing the utmost, would you call me a fucking idiot for causing the fire to spread?
Quite. Lets say you are the local elected fire warden, responsible for your community's fire safety. You are talking down a radio to the fire station to other fire fighters ready and willing to come and help you control the fire. You continue to reassure them that all is well and you have the situation under control, and that they don't need to come and help even as the fire spreads to neighbouring buildings.
He was in the high risk group... 60+ with existing health complications, why didn’t he stay at home? Instead of blaming others she could easily say his own irresponsibility killed him. Either way I wouldn’t blame anyone. For people like him death is the rule, not the exception. If an unusually high number of people in their prime were dropping dead maybe she’d have a point.
I think you missed my point about him already being in the high risk group. She implies throughout the article that someone in his small Appalachian town who didn’t wear a mask is responsible for killing him yet he was already unhealthy and in and out of the hospital. It’s a large stretch. By her logic, she should be blaming the hospital but that wouldn’t make sense either.
What does this story tell us? Nothing. No matter how good the government is, there would be definitely be one preventable death. Also looking at her previous posts, this is like she found the perfect story, or it isn't unlikely she is making up the details.
This story wasn't related to Trump at all and yet reporter mentions trump 16 times by name and many more by pronoun. I hope HN stops upvoting clickbait stories like this just because this anecdote agrees with what you want to read about.
Maybe if our COVID response was like Germany, a lot of
lives would have been saved, like her grandfather. Why isn’t it the fault of Trump who was focused on his re-election and did the bare minimum?
“no matter how good the government is..” classic strawman. it’s like saying no matter how good the vaccine is, there would be one preventable death, so why blame anti-vaxxers.
"Maybe if our COVID response was like Germany" This is classic strawman. What I said is true, that this one anecdote doesn't tell anything. I am not saying Trump's response is good, just that this story doesn't prove anything just a zeal against trump.
> With more than 230,000 Americans dead from a virus that could have been contained
It could not have been "contained" in the United States. Half the (ineffectual) stuff we do now is unconstitutional. You cannot restrict religious or other forms of peaceable assembly under our constitution. We've observed quite a bit of that in the past few months. Moreover, 230K is 1/10th the projected number of deaths (2.2M). The "if we do everything almost perfectly" scenario according to Dr Deborah Birx: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dzl1E4x-k2w
This part of the US perspective on covid-19 I don't understand.
Everywhere I keep reading comments that suggest you pretty much deserved what you got and americans only have themselves to blame because 'if everyone just wore masks' it 'could have been contained'. Literally nothing suggests that, no other country in the world shows any statistics to back this up, and the situation is pretty much as bad as or worse in many parts of the world that did mandate masks and had lock-downs, while it is much better in other parts of the world that did none of these things. Europe is the prime example of this, there's so much variation in the measures that different countries took, but I literally see zero correlation with infection rates or deaths, not up until the point where countries go into lock-downs that dramatically limit the movement of people and the chance of getting in contact with 'strangers' that you would never get in contact with if you worked from home, did not go to bars or restaurants, did not use public transport, etc. But these measures are not sustainable long-term, so sooner or later they are relaxed and the infections start to go up again, with or without face masks, with or without people doing 'everything in their power to stop the virus' because they are traumatised by the first wave. Just look at Italy, one of the hardest hit countries in Europe in the first wave, and the place they are now in again. If anything, the countries that were the first to issue mask mandates and kept expanding them (Italy, France, Spain, Belgium) are now all at the bottom of the list in terms of covid infections and deaths in the second wave.
I'll probably get downvoted into oblivion by saying as much because it's already clear to me that in the US wearing face masks is more like a religion or a political statement, but alas... The main point I wanted to make is that blaming yourself and others for the situation you are in because it 'would have been easy to contain, if only...' is not backed up by any evidence, and IMO just a form of self-torture.
You start out cricising the "US perspective" and go on to give an entirely US-centric perspective on it: We can't do anything, nothing has been proven, none of you are thinking clearly.
You have a dismissive attitude towards all measures taken by asian countries with very good (at least compared to willfully negligent countries) COVID-19 responses. This entire post obliquely critiques other people for not thinking clearly (or even god forbid "rationally"), but it is ironically very clear you have an extremely tenuous grasp of the reality of the situation yourself.
> [...] it's already clear to me that in the US wearing face masks is more like a religion or a political statement [...]
What about wearing masks in countries where there are mask mandates with different levels of strictness and requirements? At which point does the personal decision to wear a mask, when not strictly mandatory, become a "religion or a political statement"? Are mask mandates elsewhere religious or ideological decisions, rather than debatably effective public health decisions?
Leaving aside the question of whether masks are or are not effective (and if so, to what extent, under what conditions, etc.), I think that it's disingenuous to dismiss the decision of people who wear them as an irrational or ideologically motivated choice. Many of them honestly believe (rightly or wrongly) that scientific evidence supports that using a mask is an effective way of either preventing their own infection or community spread. It is in the nature of human society that we don't meticulously research every rational decision we make, but rather rely on general approximations and societal consensus.
I think that talking about wearing face masks as a religious or political statement is in itself a political statement.
That's pretty much a given that you'll get downvoted. I mean yeah, masks seem like a good idea regardless, and they aren't too onerous. People should wear them. They should wash their hands, too, and take vitamin D, and try to lose some weight. Same with outdoor dining or reduced occupancy. But everything else is COVID theater pretty much, and our politicians are known to make idiotic decisions under the circumstances. That's why some of our states (such as NY and NJ) have some of the highest death rates in the world - the politicians there had the bright idea to send COVID patients straight to the nursing homes, even though it was clear from the very beginning of the spread in the US that this was an extremely bad idea. The outbreak _started_ in the nursing homes in the Washington state. These same people are still there, and they're still in charge of whatever passes for "COVID response" in their states. The results are quite predictable.
As the sibling comment says, several countries have managed to contain it.
The problem is where measures are "leaky". Like computer security, you can't tell when it's working, and it potentially only takes one leak for an outbreak to happen. It seems (and well-collated evidence is lacking for this) that it's certain workplaces where the transmission is happening, along with people who don't believe it's real continuing to meet indoors in close spaces. For example, meat processing plants: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-meat-ex...
Uh no, Italy failed to enforce social distancing in the two most critical transmission choke points: public transport and health care.
In the months after the first wave nobody bothered leasing new vehicles for an already over-capacity public transport network. Excuses abounded, someone even claimed the form for the vehicle registration certificate didn't have separate fields for owner and leaser... I'm not joking. The real reason? Debt. There's no money left and 20 years of defunding and spending-diversion left behind a crippled and stunted administrative apparatus. So, people and students traveled face to face in early September when schools and workplaces reopened.
Hospitals are under-staffed after years of austerity measures trying to tame monstrous debts. General Practitioner networks have also been shut-down to favor private clinics and centralized hospitals. Infected people sat in ER waiting rooms for hours, and the few GPs that still operate were given 5 protective masks per month to work with.
"COVID Hotels" - normal hotels rented out wholesale by government to keep low-grades and convalescents were never made operational and people were left home to infect family members or in hospital to infect other patients while overwhelming the already thin infrastructure. Some criminally-stupid civil servant even ordered them back to nursing homes, killing more of the aging population that fortuitously survived the first wave.
This has nothing to do with the effectiveness of masks, but all to the culturally ingrained disorganization of Italians.
Eg: In Germany the government is already planning the logistics for mass vaccination, while in Italy the Special Commissioner for Health of Calabria (try to imagine this like a bankruptcy executor, but for a regional government) resigned after an interview where to the question "where is the COVID plan for Calabria" he answered "why are you asking me? Do I have to make this plan? - shuffles papers - Oh yes, according to this document I'm responsible. Hmm." They're trying to find a replacement, but two other resigned for various reasons... it might have to do with the last political murder of Calabria some years ago: the hospital supply chain is in the hands of the 'Ndrangheta (the local organized crime syndicate)
To put some numbers to it - Thailand: population 70 million, number of confirmed cases < 4,000, number of deaths 60, not an island - borders Myanmar on the west, Laos north and northeast, Cambodia east, Malaysia south.
Yeah it's a lot easier if you are an island, go into super strict lock-down, and can do super-efficient (and privacy invasive) contact tracing before the number of infections even goes over 1 in 100K, like in the countries you mentioned. ..
That doesn't contradict anything I said though, I was only commenting on the US situation and whether it could have been contained by 'just wearing masks'.
To all intents and purposes, the USA are an island. They have just two land borders with neighbours they have somewhat acceptable relations with.
I think the real issue they have is the unwillingness to cooperate with the other two measures: lockdowns (clashes with "freedom", at least temporarily) to reduce the number of cases to a range where they can be contact traced and then to allow contact tracing (I would guess this is because of a lack of trust in the government) to actually find people that might become infectious before they actually do.
BTW "Just wearing masks" is not the solution but part of it.
Few think wearing masks alone could contain the virus.
(Be wary of inventing quotes to make your argument.)
It’s just the simplest, easiest thing most people can do that is effective. A no-brainer first step that slows down the spread, and consequently saves lives and/or lessens the need for harsher measures, like lockdowns.
The 2.2 million number was the projected number (In March) of deaths with no mitigation taken. 200,000 is what Dr. Birx said then, in March.
We're in November now, and it's surging again. Less people are dying as we've learned how to best treat it, but the biggest risks are with overwhelming healthcare resources and that's exactly what is starting to happen as cases begin to surge, once again.
We could have done better as a country. It's hard to see how anyone could argue against that. Regardless of how you feel politically, the response in the US has been poorly coordinated at best.
People are dying at a much lower rate, we have the highest testing throughput in the world (and still growing), and if mainstream press is to be believed, we're a month or two from deploying a "95% effective" vaccine. We'll be fine.
There are also plenty deleterious long-term effects from Covid infections that aren't outright dying.
We'll be fine (most of us, eventually, on a long enough timeline). That doesn't excuse the failure to meaningfully respond to the issue in the first place.
