The more I see come out of NY and NJ, I really wish the rest of the country would get much more aggressive with shelter in place and social distancing. It would save them and us as a nation a whole lot of grief and anguish.
Yep, although I think this has spread far more than we realize. Was talking with my brother in Lincoln last week, and he was talking about how they had reported cases up in some little nowhere town near the South Dakota border.
I agree and that's why I think it's critically important to not waste this time. This thing was probably bouncing around our area since at least the beginning of February.
Possibly even earlier: the first instance of this being recognized in China was November 17th. Heck, even Taiwan didn't start putting in procedures until the beginning of January.
In other news, the U.S. intelligence community is investigating whether water really is wet.
When I was in Tokyo in 2005, about 10% of the people on the streets were wearing masks.
Then push the home made mask.
In late January, having seen Fauci's comments, I also didn't think this would end up being what it became, but certainly by about mid-February, when we had learned much more and many more experts were sounding pandemic alarms and when the public first learned of the testing debacle at the CDC (on 2/12), that would've been the time to mobilize the Federal government and not much really happened for another 3-4 weeks despite tens of thousands of testing kits being available from Germany and South Korea.
It is great news and hopefully that area will be used to get whatever kinks they need to work out so they can get it in the City and treat me.
The improved virus testing is great to get a better handle on this outbreak, but until we have widespread antibody tests (becoming available now), there's simply no way we can go back to life as it used to be. We'll likely have <1% of the population infected (1% would be 3MM and we have 214K positive cases now) when we hopefully get past this first wave, which means 99% of the population could still get the virus, meaning it will still spread like wildfire if we go back to normal life.
Yikes - does that mean you think you have the virus? Hope not, but godspeed if you do.
No.
The Chinese had not shared how transmissible it was until early February, but clearly it was pretty bad for China to shut the country down. Should Fauci have sounded a stronger alarm (and the WHO) earlier? Probably. Should some major democratic leaders? Probably. And I actually agree that the American public would have probably not followed a shutdown in late February (I didn't start until 3/3), but the testing debacle had nothing to do with the American public, nor did not being ready to track and quarantine cases - that was just about all on the CDC and the Administration (as were the very late medical supplies preparations). But none of that is going to help us today. What we need today is a coordinated national shutdown and more federal energy behind taking over and solving the medical supplies mess and working on getting masks to everyone. The Administration is doing a lot more than they were, but not enough yet, IMO.
Whew, thanks. What you and the health care workers need is the antibody-plasma experiments to work, so highly at-risk people can be given immunity to this horrible virus. It's potentially the fastest and best short term hope. I've heard results in 3-4 weeks, but it's hard to find info on line about this...
Anyone who saw the videos coming out of China in January (and they were freely available on twitter, so the US officials had to know of them), then saw the Chinese lockdown a hundred million people and STILL believed the virus was not easily transmissible was a fool. I don't know what the hell the WHO officials were thinking, but they repeatedly downplayed the threat at least in public. Who knows what was going on behind the scenes with them and in the US government. But we are all now paying the price. I'm not going to pin all the blame on Trump, I've said before this is a failure on many levels and over many administrations. We've been let down big time by the government on this one - years and decades of pandemic planning and we don't have anywhere near enough PPE, ventilators, drugs. Massive, massive failure.
