^ this. Thank you. We need to address why we as a nation haven’t been able to get our act together.
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Right. And hindsight is always 20/20. In the 3rd week of January Dr. Fauci was saying he didn’t think this was going to be too serious of a problem. Too many politicians and media talking heads reading their teleprompters in a studio became experts with all the answers after the dung hit the fan.
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Exactly. Sadly that’s always the case. I think @beherenow’s post hits it square on the head: we have known that a pandemic was bound to hit us for the better part of two decades. Chinese wet markets aside, we’ve been complacent about it over multiple administrations. Meanwhile, hospitals have been incentivize to operate on tight margins in terms of capacity (ideally using up 95% of their capacity as business-as-usual) to “optimize” and operate “lean” meaning that we had no headroom for an epidemic or even a major catastrophe of a different nature.
Americans are dying because of what we have been doing as an electorate.
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I wore a “mask” when I went to mail a package this morning. All I can do is what I can do. It’s all any of us can do.
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Source? He seems to smart to have said such a thing imho but was also a replacement for whoever else had been fired.
Exactly, he said in the same period that over 500 people per day died here in Italy … and some in England, always in the same period, said, referring to the blockages and closings of non-essential activities imposed by our government which "for Italians make every excuse to have a holiday ".
If this is not nearsightedness and stupidity!
Unfortunately, however, the bill is coming!!!
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China is just doing this at a much more massive scale than everyone else due to population + size, probably?
Anyways, China is good at being strict and authoritarian so perhaps they can enforce this better than different countries, too?
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Giving in to pressure makes him a tool then! We all know this is not going to kill more than 10% of our population, but that’s still a few people dead.
Yet, the numbers are all depending on how you want to look at it. The reason to let it spread is backed by sound data. As a think tank report stated and many politicians based their stance on, Texas Lt. Gov being one, said, “the least productive and largest drain on the economy” were most at risk. So their idea was let it happen and spread everywhere asap to develop the herd contamination and then herd immunity after the dying stabilized.
“While there are people with high spending at all ages, overall, people age 55 and over made up 29% of the population but accounted for 56% of all health spending in 2016 (which has only gone up since then). In contrast, people under age 35 made up 46% of the population but accounted for less than a quarter of health spending.” And… “government pays for almost two-thirds (or 68%) of health care spending by the elderly” so the government is more than ready to watch those cost decline by any means.
These are the reports that said, ‘ride it like a cowboy’.
That is some unfortunately selective, partisan style editing … he said “right now”. I’ll transcribe the full clip:
Well, obviously you need to take it seriously and do the kinds of things that the CDC and the department of homeland security are doing… but this is not a major threat for the people in the united states and this is not something that the citizens of the united states right now [January 21st, 2020] should be worried about.
It’s true in my opinion that China really did cover up the scale of this thing in the beginning. Presumably our intelligence orgs (and our US spies inside China, because you know we have them) saw what was actually happening, and people at the highest levels of the american government were getting that information about what was actually happening in China versus the official propaganda coming out of that authoritarian country.
The question is what authorities in the highest level in the US government did with that information, since they had it well before any of us did 
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In Sweden until yesterday everyone continued to live as if nothing had happened in the world, but in two days they have had over 400 deaths … now they are starting to set up a hospital at the Stockholm fair and think of starting to close activities in the capital .
They begin to be afraid … but what they have not understood or did not want to understand is that with this virus (and especially with its long latency times) when you start to be afraid it is now too late!
What you see today, in terms of deaths and infections, is actually what happened two weeks ago … and all this time, behaving in that reckless way you have done nothing but play his game, giving him a huge and fearful advantage , which will have a great cost, in terms of human lives.
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I just looked for a clip quickly. I was not cherry-picking.
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That’s fine. Then everyone can refer to my complete transcription, which I handily provided, because I am very thorough, almost… annoyingly… thorough. It’s who I am, for better or worse 
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This is a huge idiocy!
In order to be able to count on flock immunity, you need to be able to count on a population that is now immunized that goes over 70-80%, so that infected individuals are so “isolated” and distant from potentially infectious ones … such a result the cost in terms of human lives is very high … in fact, you almost create a genociad.
Ask Boris Johnson, now that he is “in the weaker part of the flock”, because he is hospitalized with respiratory problems and that his pregnant wife is also positive for covid-19, if he still adopts this theory which he was proud of two weeks ago. !
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Exactly this. Or even now. Didn’t the governor of Georgia only realize Thurs or Fri of last week that asymptomatic individuals were spreading the disease because of the long incubation period? How is there an excuse for that level of ignorance about a public health emergency?
We can’t control what China does no matter how much we yell about it but we can control what we do in this country to respond. There are two questions IMO: why was our response so lackluster as it became evident that this was a pandemic, and the harder question of why we’ve collectively ignored literally two decades of warnings about our national inability to respond to an epidemic or pandemic?
I get that people are angry and afraid—I live in NYC, I’m angry and afraid too—but I think pointing at everything China did wrong is less useful than looking at everything we did wrong here in the US (or Italy or Spain or wherever you are).
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This is an in-group Dr’s message that leaked before he died, or was ‘died’. Although he was reported as the whistle blower, another Dr. had given him the whistle and has now disappeared too.
I wish I had saved the drone footage videos from China that hit YT. It was pretty amazing but I can’t find any now. They swooped in on country farms and cities alike with state messages to stay indoors if a single person went outside.
Figured out how to profit and seize more power. They sold stock, or bought it. On both sides. They are also happily buying up any small or medium business for pennies on the dollar at 0% interest with our tax $. Same as 2008. Well, the 1st great depression too.
Very much so. Money > lives here. The reports he is referencing in the 1st minute of the ‘ride it like a cowboy’ speech are based on the multiple numbers/simulations they ran.
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I’m not trying to jump on you, but, “herd immunity” is a term used in the medical & epidemiology communities since forever (first described in the 1930s based on study of a measles outbreak). I definitely don’t like thinking of myself as a cow or sheep, but, I also have other things I would rather focus on than semantics. That said, yes, the mayor of NYC is responsible for his inaction in calling for schools and such to shut down, especially when the epicenter of the NY State COVID-19 outbreak was in a suburb 30 minutes outside of NYC.
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And sadly, on our behalf in the US, I fell for the “it’s no big deal, no different than the flu” scheme that was presented to us. As I saw it getting more serious, I began to wake up and realize that we here were also misguided including myself…I was ready to go to a theme park with my friends that weekend before CA imposed the Shelter in Place move. When I saw that friday before my anticipated visit that all theme parks across the country were holding operation and delaying opening, I slowly began to realize that this was a little more serious. And now after having lost 2 friends over the virus (may they RIP), the precautions are here.
I don’t ever dive into politics but this was the one time I wanted to bring something up and how we including myself were misguided in the early days of the pandemic.
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I’m so sorry for your loss. I’ve been lucky not to have lost anyone yet, but I have friends who have.
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I suffer from your loss and I offer you my sincere condolences.
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