COVID-19 - On the Ground

[jfish26]

If you’re concerned about YOU, then YOU need to take measures to protect YOURSELF and stop expecting the rest of us to shut down our lives for YOU.

I 100% agree in regards to taking measures to protect YOURSELF. Problem is/was there were/are way too may YOUS who didn't/don't give a fuck about others and because of it, WE suffered.
I didn't expect a single person to do anything JUST for ME. The "shutdown/s" were not for ME. They were for US.
Right or wrong of me, I did (and continue to) expect people to do SOME things out of common sense and dignity for others. Covid related or not.
I don't believe there will be another "shutdown" unless we see something worse than 1 million Americans dying. If God forbid that happens, then I will reluctantly (but still will) be on board. I fully understand many others will not be.

We all remember the b.s.: two weeks to stop the virus; six weeks to flatten the curve and so forth. None of it worked. The bottom line is that, if you are concerned about getting sick, you need to barricade yourself in your home until you feel safe. The rest of us will continue to live our lives.

Let’s talk about this, avoiding buzzword bingo as much as possible.

Put simply, the plan itself was (at a high level) scientifically sound. If you stop person-to-person transmission, the virus will die out.

The plan failed for several reasons, all ultimately social/practical (and not fundamentally scientific/medical).

The single biggest reason, in my view, is that the success of the plan required collective will that was never realistic to expect. And why was that collective will never realistic to expect? In my opinion it starts at the top - the president, perhaps the only person in the world who had the practical ability to turn MAGAs into plan adopters, instead chose denialism and blame-shifting for personal reasons.

MAGAs followed his lead, and so the usual pattern resulted: (1) render government incapable of functioning, and then (2) declare government incapable of functioning. The plan failed. By design? Not exactly I guess. But certainly failure was an easy-to-spot inevitability; the math just doesn’t check out if buy-in is split along party lines.

The secondary failure of the plan is a little murkier to unpack. Essentially, the public health authorities did not anticipate, and then failed to timely grasp that, confusingly to them, plan buy-in would be split along party lines. This failure was compounded by the executive branch’s delinquency to develop and roll out adequate surveillance functions. Testing and tracing.

This matters because a Plan B that had a good chance to work would have been to modulate the restrictions (the pain) on a targeted basis. But because of the fog of war resulting from a materially non-existent surveillance function, we burned everyone’s reserve for collective sacrifice out before - and this CANNOT be emphasized enough - the sacrifice even mattered. Kansas City did NOT need to lock down when New York did. And Garden City did NOT need to lock down when Kansas City did.

But - and this is another thing that CANNOT be emphasized enough - this less restrictive sort of plan never had a chance to work, because our surveillance failure meant we would never have the data to do anything on a targeted, smaller-scale basis. So blunt measures - measures that drove wedges in deeper, and that could not work anyway because adoption was split along party lines - were all we had.

So in hindsight (especially knowing what we know now, but didn’t then, about the virus itself), the better plan would have been something less ambitious but more practicable. Universal masking indoors around people, but no shutdowns.

But that was never on the table because, from the top of leadership and from the outset of the problem, our first interest was in denialism and blame-shifting. And then our second interest was in adoption of partisan totems as opposed to practicable, actionable plans that had a chance of working.

We failed for social and practical reasons, not scientific and medical ones.

[randylahey]

If you’re concerned about YOU, then YOU need to take measures to protect YOURSELF and stop expecting the rest of us to shut down our lives for YOU.

I 100% agree in regards to taking measures to protect YOURSELF. Problem is/was there were/are way too may YOUS who didn't/don't give a fuck about others and because of it, WE suffered.
I didn't expect a single person to do anything JUST for ME. The "shutdown/s" were not for ME. They were for US.
Right or wrong of me, I did (and continue to) expect people to do SOME things out of common sense and dignity for others. Covid related or not.
I don't believe there will be another "shutdown" unless we see something worse than 1 million Americans dying. If God forbid that happens, then I will reluctantly (but still will) be on board. I fully understand many others will not be.

We all remember the b.s.: two weeks to stop the virus; six weeks to flatten the curve and so forth. None of it worked. The bottom line is that, if you are concerned about getting sick, you need to barricade yourself in your h ome until you feel safe. The rest of us will continue to live our lives.

Bingo. Now why is it so fucking hard for the fearful to understand this?

Just because you are scared of living a normal life doesn't mean you have any right to stop other people from doing so

[JKLivin]

I 100% agree in regards to taking measures to protect YOURSELF. Problem is/was there were/are way too may YOUS who didn't/don't give a fuck about others and because of it, WE suffered.
I didn't expect a single person to do anything JUST for ME. The "shutdown/s" were not for ME. They were for US.
Right or wrong of me, I did (and continue to) expect people to do SOME things out of common sense and dignity for others. Covid related or not.
I don't believe there will be another "shutdown" unless we see something worse than 1 million Americans dying. If God forbid that happens, then I will reluctantly (but still will) be on board. I fully understand many others will not be.

We all remember the b.s.: two weeks to stop the virus; six weeks to flatten the curve and so forth. None of it worked. The bottom line is that, if you are concerned about getting sick, you need to barricade yourself in your home until you feel safe. The rest of us will continue to live our lives.

Let’s talk about this, avoiding buzzword bingo as much as possible.

Put simply, the plan itself was (at a high level) scientifically sound. If you stop person-to-person transmission, the virus will die out.

The plan failed for several reasons, all ultimately social/practical (and not fundamentally scientific/medical).

The single biggest reason, in my view, is that the success of the plan required collective will that was never realistic to expect. And why was that collective will never realistic to expect? In my opinion it starts at the top - the president, perhaps the only person in the world who had the practical ability to turn MAGAs into plan adopters, instead chose denialism and blame-shifting for personal reasons.

MAGAs followed his lead, and so the usual pattern resulted: (1) render government incapable of functioning, and then (2) declare government incapable of functioning. The plan failed. By design? Not exactly I guess. But certainly failure was an easy-to-spot inevitability; the math just doesn’t check out if buy-in is split along party lines.

The secondary failure of the plan is a little murkier to unpack. Essentially, the public health authorities did not anticipate, and then failed to timely grasp that, confusingly to them, plan buy-in would be split along party lines. This failure was compounded by the executive branch’s delinquency to develop and roll out adequate surveillance functions. Testing and tracing.

This matters because a Plan B that had a good chance to work would have been to modulate the restrictions (the pain) on a targeted basis. But because of the fog of war resulting from a materially non-existent surveillance function, we burned everyone’s reserve for collective sacrifice out before - and this CANNOT be emphasized enough - the sacrifice even mattered. Kansas City did NOT need to lock down when New York did. And Garden City did NOT need to lock down when Kansas City did.

But - and this is another thing that CANNOT be emphasized enough - this less restrictive sort of plan never had a chance to work, because our surveillance failure meant we would never have the data to do anything on a targeted, smaller-scale basis. So blunt measures - measures that drove wedges in deeper, and that could not work anyway because adoption was split along party lines - were all we had.

So in hindsight (especially knowing what we know now, but didn’t then, about the virus itself), the better plan would have been something less ambitious but more practicable. Universal masking indoors around people, but no shutdowns.

But that was never on the table because, from the top of leadership and from the outset of the problem, our first interest was in denialism and blame-shifting. And then our second interest was in adoption of partisan totems as opposed to practicable, actionable plans that had a chance of working.

We failed for social and practical reasons, not scientific and medical ones.

My main quarrel with that reasoning is the example of China. The did all of the draconian measures and they also had a cultural norm of compliance with them. The outcome? Just as bad - if not worse - than here. My wife's best friend was an English teacher over there throughout, so we got the firsthand reports of all that people went through, as well as how it never ended. My thought is, if it is going to be the same outcome anyway, let's dispense with the harmful measures and do life.

[jfish26]

We all remember the b.s.: two weeks to stop the virus; six weeks to flatten the curve and so forth. None of it worked. The bottom line is that, if you are concerned about getting sick, you need to barricade yourself in your home until you feel safe. The rest of us will continue to live our lives.

Let’s talk about this, avoiding buzzword bingo as much as possible.

Put simply, the plan itself was (at a high level) scientifically sound. If you stop person-to-person transmission, the virus will die out.

The plan failed for several reasons, all ultimately social/practical (and not fundamentally scientific/medical).

The single biggest reason, in my view, is that the success of the plan required collective will that was never realistic to expect. And why was that collective will never realistic to expect? In my opinion it starts at the top - the president, perhaps the only person in the world who had the practical ability to turn MAGAs into plan adopters, instead chose denialism and blame-shifting for personal reasons.

MAGAs followed his lead, and so the usual pattern resulted: (1) render government incapable of functioning, and then (2) declare government incapable of functioning. The plan failed. By design? Not exactly I guess. But certainly failure was an easy-to-spot inevitability; the math just doesn’t check out if buy-in is split along party lines.

The secondary failure of the plan is a little murkier to unpack. Essentially, the public health authorities did not anticipate, and then failed to timely grasp that, confusingly to them, plan buy-in would be split along party lines. This failure was compounded by the executive branch’s delinquency to develop and roll out adequate surveillance functions. Testing and tracing.

This matters because a Plan B that had a good chance to work would have been to modulate the restrictions (the pain) on a targeted basis. But because of the fog of war resulting from a materially non-existent surveillance function, we burned everyone’s reserve for collective sacrifice out before - and this CANNOT be emphasized enough - the sacrifice even mattered. Kansas City did NOT need to lock down when New York did. And Garden City did NOT need to lock down when Kansas City did.

But - and this is another thing that CANNOT be emphasized enough - this less restrictive sort of plan never had a chance to work, because our surveillance failure meant we would never have the data to do anything on a targeted, smaller-scale basis. So blunt measures - measures that drove wedges in deeper, and that could not work anyway because adoption was split along party lines - were all we had.

So in hindsight (especially knowing what we know now, but didn’t then, about the virus itself), the better plan would have been something less ambitious but more practicable. Universal masking indoors around people, but no shutdowns.

But that was never on the table because, from the top of leadership and from the outset of the problem, our first interest was in denialism and blame-shifting. And then our second interest was in adoption of partisan totems as opposed to practicable, actionable plans that had a chance of working.

We failed for social and practical reasons, not scientific and medical ones.

My main quarrel with that reasoning is the example of China. The did all of the draconian measures and they also had a cultural norm of compliance with them. The outcome? Just as bad - if not worse - than here. My wife's best friend was an English teacher over there throughout, so we got the firsthand reports of all that people went through, as well as how it never ended. My thought is, if it is going to be the same outcome anyway, let's dispense with the harmful measures and do life.

I guess I am more hopeful than this. I do not think that others’ failure to do the right thing should stop us from doing the right thing.

[JKLivin]

Let’s talk about this, avoiding buzzword bingo as much as possible.

Put simply, the plan itself was (at a high level) scientifically sound. If you stop person-to-person transmission, the virus will die out.

The plan failed for several reasons, all ultimately social/practical (and not fundamentally scientific/medical).

The single biggest reason, in my view, is that the success of the plan required collective will that was never realistic to expect. And why was that collective will never realistic to expect? In my opinion it starts at the top - the president, perhaps the only person in the world who had the practical ability to turn MAGAs into plan adopters, instead chose denialism and blame-shifting for personal reasons.

MAGAs followed his lead, and so the usual pattern resulted: (1) render government incapable of functioning, and then (2) declare government incapable of functioning. The plan failed. By design? Not exactly I guess. But certainly failure was an easy-to-spot inevitability; the math just doesn’t check out if buy-in is split along party lines.

The secondary failure of the plan is a little murkier to unpack. Essentially, the public health authorities did not anticipate, and then failed to timely grasp that, confusingly to them, plan buy-in would be split along party lines. This failure was compounded by the executive branch’s delinquency to develop and roll out adequate surveillance functions. Testing and tracing.

This matters because a Plan B that had a good chance to work would have been to modulate the restrictions (the pain) on a targeted basis. But because of the fog of war resulting from a materially non-existent surveillance function, we burned everyone’s reserve for collective sacrifice out before - and this CANNOT be emphasized enough - the sacrifice even mattered. Kansas City did NOT need to lock down when New York did. And Garden City did NOT need to lock down when Kansas City did.

But - and this is another thing that CANNOT be emphasized enough - this less restrictive sort of plan never had a chance to work, because our surveillance failure meant we would never have the data to do anything on a targeted, smaller-scale basis. So blunt measures - measures that drove wedges in deeper, and that could not work anyway because adoption was split along party lines - were all we had.

So in hindsight (especially knowing what we know now, but didn’t then, about the virus itself), the better plan would have been something less ambitious but more practicable. Universal masking indoors around people, but no shutdowns.

But that was never on the table because, from the top of leadership and from the outset of the problem, our first interest was in denialism and blame-shifting. And then our second interest was in adoption of partisan totems as opposed to practicable, actionable plans that had a chance of working.

We failed for social and practical reasons, not scientific and medical ones.

My main quarrel with that reasoning is the example of China. The did all of the draconian measures and they also had a cultural norm of compliance with them. The outcome? Just as bad - if not worse - than here. My wife's best friend was an English teacher over there throughout, so we got the firsthand reports of all that people went through, as well as how it never ended. My thought is, if it is going to be the same outcome anyway, let's dispense with the harmful measures and do life.

I guess I am more hopeful than this. I do not think that others’ failure to do the right thing should stop us from doing the right thing.

You missed my point. They DID all of the things you suggested - to the Nth degree. It did no good.

[randylahey]

This is why a normal person doesn't freak out and think you're masking and booster shot demands are necessary. Cause it's all a load of shit. Built around a money and power grab

[randylahey]

Ultimately the goal now is to slowly implement stronger and stronger mandates. Instead of trying to do it all at once. And then coincidentally in time for the 2024 election, mail in voting will suddenly be "necessary"

So we can repeat 2020. The election surrounded with the weirdest set of circumstances ever

And now the are trying to jail the guy who questioned it

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

I 100% agree in regards to taking measures to protect YOURSELF. Problem is/was there were/are way too may YOUS who didn't/don't give a fuck about others and because of it, WE suffered.
I didn't expect a single person to do anything JUST for ME. The "shutdown/s" were not for ME. They were for US.
Right or wrong of me, I did (and continue to) expect people to do SOME things out of common sense and dignity for others. Covid related or not.
I don't believe there will be another "shutdown" unless we see something worse than 1 million Americans dying. If God forbid that happens, then I will reluctantly (but still will) be on board. I fully understand many others will not be.

We all remember the b.s.: two weeks to stop the virus; six weeks to flatten the curve and so forth. None of it worked. The bottom line is that, if you are concerned about getting sick, you need to barricade yourself in your h ome until you feel safe. The rest of us will continue to live our lives.

Bingo. Now why is it so fucking hard for the fearful to understand this?

Just because you are scared of living a normal life doesn't mean you have any right to stop other people from doing so

You didn't answer my question asking if you had Covid more than once but I'm going ahead and asking you another question in hope/s you may answer it.
Who on here and who do you personally know that is fearful of living a normal life?

In my 56 years of living in this country and on this planet I have never been fearful of living a normal life. I fully admit I have been fearful to various degrees of some things that have not been the norm. Such as excessive crime where and near where I live and work - but back to keeping on topic - a virus that never previously existed and contributed to the severe illness and death/s of millions of Americans.
Hey, congrats on being a macho man (and a dumb fuck?) that didn't "fear" (nor respect?) a deadly virus that killed many people - and if you're not lying, people you knew. I guess you're a better man than I am.

[jfish26]

This is why a normal person doesn't freak out and think you're masking and booster shot demands are necessary. Cause it's all a load of shit. Built around a money and power grab

You have not answered the question - what do you think the primary purpose of masks is? Hint: it’s not the same side of the equation as boosters.

[jfish26]

My main quarrel with that reasoning is the example of China. The did all of the draconian measures and they also had a cultural norm of compliance with them. The outcome? Just as bad - if not worse - than here. My wife's best friend was an English teacher over there throughout, so we got the firsthand reports of all that people went through, as well as how it never ended. My thought is, if it is going to be the same outcome anyway, let's dispense with the harmful measures and do life.

I guess I am more hopeful than this. I do not think that others’ failure to do the right thing should stop us from doing the right thing.

You missed my point. They DID all of the things you suggested - to the Nth degree. It did no good.

I don’t think we know enough about what China did or didn’t do, or about their relative successes or failures, to draw conclusions.

[Sparko]

And then there is China's poverty and population density. There is a reason you want your surgeon to mask up and have a sterile OR

Pro tip: you don't have to defend every RW nutty contention.

[randylahey]

We all remember the b.s.: two weeks to stop the virus; six weeks to flatten the curve and so forth. None of it worked. The bottom line is that, if you are concerned about getting sick, you need to barricade yourself in your h ome until you feel safe. The rest of us will continue to live our lives.

Bingo. Now why is it so fucking hard for the fearful to understand this?

Just because you are scared of living a normal life doesn't mean you have any right to stop other people from doing so

You didn't answer my question asking if you had Covid more than once but I'm going ahead and asking you another question in hope/s you may answer it.
Who on here and who do you personally know that is fearful of living a normal life?

In my 56 years of living in this country and on this planet I have never been fearful of living a normal life. I fully admit I have been fearful to various degrees of some things that have not been the norm. Such as excessive crime where and near where I live and work - but back to keeping on topic - a virus that never previously existed and contributed to the severe illness and death/s of millions of Americans.
Hey, congrats on being a macho man (and a dumb fuck?) that didn't "fear" (nor respect?) a deadly virus that killed many people - and if you're not lying, people you knew. I guess you're a better man than I am.

One time that I know of. Unless I had it in my system other times without symptoms

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

Bingo. Now why is it so fucking hard for the fearful to understand this?

Just because you are scared of living a normal life doesn't mean you have any right to stop other people from doing so

You didn't answer my question asking if you had Covid more than once but I'm going ahead and asking you another question in hope/s you may answer it.
Who on here and who do you personally know that is fearful of living a normal life?

In my 56 years of living in this country and on this planet I have never been fearful of living a normal life. I fully admit I have been fearful to various degrees of some things that have not been the norm. Such as excessive crime where and near where I live and work - but back to keeping on topic - a virus that never previously existed and contributed to the severe illness and death/s of millions of Americans.
Hey, congrats on being a macho man (and a dumb fuck?) that didn't "fear" (nor respect?) a deadly virus that killed many people - and if you're not lying, people you knew. I guess you're a better man than I am.

One time that I know of. Unless I had it in my system other times without symptoms

Thanks for the response - and basically incriminating yourself.

YOUR words.... "I even had the delta variant, which the fear mongers told us all was the deadliest".

YOUR words.... "I got it during the mask days. I wore them. Everyone was wearing them".

If I am not mistaken, (I may be but I don't think so) the "mandates" were lifted before Delta hit and hardly "everyone was wearing them". Right? Or am I wrong? Like I said, I may be.

[randylahey]

You didn't answer my question asking if you had Covid more than once but I'm going ahead and asking you another question in hope/s you may answer it.
Who on here and who do you personally know that is fearful of living a normal life?

In my 56 years of living in this country and on this planet I have never been fearful of living a normal life. I fully admit I have been fearful to various degrees of some things that have not been the norm. Such as excessive crime where and near where I live and work - but back to keeping on topic - a virus that never previously existed and contributed to the severe illness and death/s of millions of Americans.
Hey, congrats on being a macho man (and a dumb fuck?) that didn't "fear" (nor respect?) a deadly virus that killed many people - and if you're not lying, people you knew. I guess you're a better man than I am.

One time that I know of. Unless I had it in my system other times without symptoms

Thanks for the response - and basically incriminating yourself.

YOUR words.... "I even had the delta variant, which the fear mongers told us all was the deadliest".

YOUR words.... "I got it during the mask days. I wore them. Everyone was wearing them".

If I am not mistaken, (I may be but I don't think so) the "mandates" were lifted before Delta hit and hardly "everyone was wearing them". Right? Or am I wrong? Like I said, I may be.

the only person I was in direct contact with that had covid when I did was big on masks and was masked every time I was around them. Lol.

The person I got covid from was a big time masker

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

One time that I know of. Unless I had it in my system other times without symptoms

Thanks for the response - and basically incriminating yourself.

YOUR words.... "I even had the delta variant, which the fear mongers told us all was the deadliest".

YOUR words.... "I got it during the mask days. I wore them. Everyone was wearing them".

If I am not mistaken, (I may be but I don't think so) the "mandates" were lifted before Delta hit and hardly "everyone was wearing them". Right? Or am I wrong? Like I said, I may be.

the only person I was in direct contact with that had covid when I did was big on masks and was masked every time I was around them. Lol.

The person I got covid from was a big time masker

VGR!

I nominate your post for the Hall.

[randylahey]

[TDub]

718 pages

[randylahey]

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

I started tuning out her message as soon as I was able to read her shirt and laughed.
She has more shit on her face than I have clothes on my body right now - and I am wearing underwear, shorts, and a t-shirt.

P.S. Unlike randy, I took a minute to see what other types of things Kristen Meghan (the woman in the video - not Jessica Rojas) shares on Twitter. Clearly she is a confused woman full of contradictions. Pretty much what I expected before I took the minute to research her.

[Shirley]

Appreciate your due diligence, Gutter.

Although the filter through which Randy's posts pass might seem like a tell, to a sentient person.