Coronavirus prep

SuzySunshine99 wrote: »

A pollster in Pennsylvania was quoted as predicting that people will look back at the shutdowns and say, “Gee, not that many people died. Was it all worth it?”

Can people seriously not wrap their heads around the fact that if "not that many people" die, it will be BECAUSE of the shutdowns? That they worked as intended?

I saw a Dr. Anthony Fauci interview where he said from a practical perspective, there are only 2 possible outcomes: mitigation efforts successfully contain spread (people complain about overreaction) & mitigation efforts fail (people complain about under-reaction). He said there is no middle ground where it sort of works and people don't complain. So he defines success as people complaining that is was no big deal and we overreacted. I took that to heart. And indeed people seriously can't wrap their heads around it. Because they prefer not to.

I don't think you can order COVID-19 tests from the internet currently.

So, yesterday my state (Tennessee) had its largest single-day increase in number of cases so far. Day after tomorrow the state reopens. In what universe does this make sense?

paperpudding wrote: »

If some people don't see something, it's unpersuasive. And seeing "people not dying from a virus" or "hospitals not being overwhelmed in most places" is not "seeing something". Seeing nothing is unpersuasive.

Ann I haven't quoted your whole post and its interesting paralells to Covid 19 crisis - but yes I can see exactly this same phenomenon in area in which I work

Vaccinations: what can be seen: minor side effects like sore arm, redness, swelling, muscle ache
What can't be seen; no case of polio, tetanus, measles etc

Along with, like Covid restrictions, some The government cant tell me what to do, its not a nanny state, type thinking

So I won't get my children/myself vaccinated because I had a really sore arm afterwards and the government cant tell me what to do and and nobody gets polio/tetanus/measles these days anyway

Interesting you mention "The government cant tell me what to do". I don't live in the USA but in conversation with my wife i predicted that Americans would protest the restrictions. The overriding claim of liberty, freedom, and rights, would never tolerate lockdowns and curfews like everybody else in the world. Now the protests have started. And the freedom to "do as I please" will be everyone's downfall.

You are so lovely disagree person. I won't say more. You only care about yourself apparently.

Well, I think that there is a subset of Americans that are just rebels. I find it hard to believe that the rest of the world doesn't have these people too. It's not exactly a rare human mutation to make one's own decisions, and damn the consequences.

Now, would anyone I know admit to being rebellious in polite company? Probably not, but I have heard some of the comments when people think no one is listening.

It's complicated. And then there is the fact that most people don't live alone so they really have no control over even their own household safety and they know they're going to be exposed at some point. People are dumb. Me included. I am super scared and washing groceries and quarantining fruit and rotating jackets and shoes and wearing a mask and TRYING to stay 6 feet away - BUT I still am not doing everything I should be doing 100% of the time because there is no way to do so. I can easily understand the "rip the bandaid off" people, because there really is no way to contain this at this point - maybe there never was. I'm putting my money on Mother Nature. I think she is going to win this round, and definitely Round Two. She has a brick in her glove.

I'm not sure how the US protests are being reported in other countries, but sometimes I feel like media in one country don't necessarily get the full picture across exactly proportional to reality, when they're covering stories in another country. (I'm not saying "other countries get the US wrong", I'm saying media in many countries are a little off-tone sometimes when reporting on countries that are not their own.)

I believe that the protest in Lansing, Michigan, US, was one of the larger ones in the US, if not the largest so far. (I live in Michigan, near Lansing.)

The largest estimate I've seen so far of participation in the Lansing protest was around 4,000 people. The organizers, in advance, predicted 15,000. Most of the actual protesters were in vehicles, though something in the low hundreds of people seem to have been on foot in the vicinity of the capitol building. As far as I can tell (this part is difficult) a very small number of those were openly carrying or brandishing guns. Very clearly, people came to the protest from a wide swath of the state, based on media interviews and signs. It's unclear to me what proportion were fairly local, vs. outstate.

For scale, the population of Lansing (city, not greater metro area) is around 118,000 (as of 2018 estimates). The population of the state is around 9.98 million (as of 2019 estimates).

A recent survey estimated that 57% of state residents approve of Governor Whitmer's handling of the coronavirus crisis, and 37% disapprove. It's unclear to me how sound that survey was, but other reasonably non-partisan sources seem to have found numbers that also suggest approval outweighs disapproval. (Again, hard to tell for certain.)

Just as a point of comparison, from what most people would expect to be a different part of the political spectrum, the 2017 Women's March in Lansing, which also drew from across the state, was estimated to have had 8,000-9,000 participants. (Of course there was no virus or lockdown at that point, which would influence numbers.)

Please understand: I'm trying simply to report facts, as reported in reasonably non-partisan publications. I'm not trying to make a political point.

The point I am trying to make is to put this into some kind of scale or proportion, for people who live elsewhere. The actual protesters in the coronavirus lockdown protest in Michigan seem to have been about 0.04% of Michigan's population, more or less, as best I can tell. I am sure that there are people who agreed with them, but who stayed home. I'm sure that fear of the virus itself, and the lockdown, will have limited participation, despite the nature of the protest.

Regardless, if in other places these protests are coming across as a major slice of our state or national behavior . . . well, I dunno.

People may argue these numbers. I think it would be hard to make a defensible argument from anything but fringe sources that the magnitude of these numbers is way, way off.

News is news because it's unusual, therefore notable, often. No matter how you slice it, the overwhelming number of people here did not participate in the "mass protest".

We have non-mask-wearers and park-social-distance-violators and house-partiers just as people are reporting elsewhere in the country and world. More? Fewer? Don't know.