Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

I just got this email from my state representative. This is in PA, YMMV depending on the quality of your state health department and whether or not your governor insulted the president.

Pennsylvania plans a phased roll out of the vaccine, as was instructed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The first phase is broken into two parts, and it will focus on health care workers in hospitals and long-term care facilities, as well as EMS first responders and those living in congregate settings like long-term care facilities.

ApolloAndy said:

Maybe easeir to get fat?

Especially since the threshold for each category was lowered about 2 years ago. I was bounced into the next "not skinny" group despite having not gained any weight. I questioned the nurse and she confirmed the guidelines had changed and they had barely any patients in their practice now that weren't at least "over weight" despite most of them having not gained any weight.

So us skinny healthy people get pushed to the back of the line?

Someone has to be at the back of the line. Other than random distributions, is there someone else who should be there? Disney hates poor people so maybe poor people should be at the back of the line. ;)

So, thinking about the distributions. Healthcare workers make sense. People in assisted living not so much?

If you think about it the people who are doing the spreading should be the targets of the earliest vaccinations. Those who are out and about.

The 90 years olds in assisted living aren’t much of a threat, and quite frankly if it’s not the COVID that gets them it is the other laundry list of things just waiting around the corner for them. Is that really the best use of limited vaccines?

I would be targeting groups based on risk of spreading not risk of death, but I guess I look at things very differently.

Lots of people who aren't paid or qualified to be coaches watch games from their living room and say things like..."I would not have run that play".

From what I have been hearing and reading lately, the roughly 3% of the population who have already been infected should probably be last, if they get it at all... the news about recuperate immunity is looking very promising.
I do like the idea of targeting the most likely spreaders, but I am not sure we know what to look for. It’s not just people who are out and about, it’s people who are out and about AND who get infected AND who don’t actually get sick enough to take them out of action. Honestly if we could easily identify those people we’d have stopped the whole epidemic months ago!

—Dave Althoff, Jr.

Considering how long it takes a non-trivial number of infected people to shake it and recover, I sure hope immunity has some lasting effect.

There are currently lots of debates and lots of models being run to address the very issue of "vaccinate spreaders or vaccinate at-risk" so I certainly see merit in that position. But it's not like 90-year-olds (and 80 and 70) are just going to die 10 minutes after you give them the vaccine, so why bother? Many will live years and years, long after the vaccine has been fully distributed and will have survived because they got the vaccine first.

TheMillenniumRider said:

I would be targeting groups based on risk of spreading not risk of death, but I guess I look at things very differently.

I know this is super nit-picky, but that's kind of what we've been doing for 8 months so....

"I look at things very differently" is completely different from "I don't have all the necessary expertise, data, or tools to have an informed opinion." For the vast majority of these things (lockdowns, masks, vaccine deployment, etc.) we fall in the latter category and are just armchair quarterbacking and BSing. It's fun and interesting and probably worth doing (to build up our expertise, data, and tools) but let us never confuse having a CBuzz conversation or reading a Facebook post with decades of education, training, and experience.

Now, all that said, from what I understand, even those experts with all of the resources are debating this topic.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/20/1012313/who-should-get-...ine-first/

Well to be fair when I said differently I meant differently than the lot of everyone on this site.

While we may have been doing that for 8 months we have accomplished nothing. This is why 8 months ago I didn’t feel like wasting time and energy on a lockdown because the outcome was already obvious. Maybe that is the root issue. You will say that I am part of the problem. What problem exactly? My lack of faith that anything will actually happen? I think that is a shared thought with way more than just myself. We live in a society where everyone is right and everyone is the best at everything and we can’t hurt someone else’s feelings so little is actually accomplished because we end up bickering and fighting and considering every viewpoint from everyone which at the end of the day it should be a matter of here is what’s happening and TS if you don’t like it.

But that is generally called a dictatorship and I don’t much care for that so I really don’t know what to say.

Democracy is a cool idea and all but it sucks at getting things done.

TheMillenniumRider said:

While we may have been doing that for 8 months we have accomplished nothing. This is why 8 months ago I didn’t feel like wasting time and energy on a lockdown because the outcome was already obvious.

We actually achieved decent stabilization and mostly did the whole "flatten the curve" thing. Had we done nothing in the spring, the grim reality of right now would have been then and would have been considerably worse. We are where we are now because people that mostly did it right in the March-June timeline no longer feel like wasting time and energy on common sense mitigation protocols.

But for the initial 2-3 months when we were still learning, absolutely nobody was suggesting any kind of "lockdown" or even stay at home restrictions until it got this bad. And it got this bad because not everybody was willing to even do the bare minimum. Instead of having the everyday life routine at 70-75%, enough people demanded their freedom was on the line and had to have 100% or nothing. Now we're here.

And like Jeff mentioning dry humping, I'll remind everyone again that we have never been under any sort of lockdown in the United States. Non essential businesses closed and you were encouraged to remain home or isolated. But nobody in this country ever faced legal trouble or even a warning or citation for getting in the car to drive around town, grab a McFlurry, sit in an open park, or even visit friends and family in another home. The 7-Eleven down the road never closed and never stopped selling gas or slurpees. That's not a lockdown. Other countries restricted movement to the point that you were told when to go shopping, that no one could go with you, and you weren't even allowed to go outside in your own yard to walk around and exercise outside of a predetermined window of time. That's a lockdown.

I watched Totally Under Control on Hulu, and it's upsetting. It puts the dates and sequence of actions (or inaction) in perspective, and it's not that scientists and experts didn't understand along the way what to do or when, it's that political leaders ignored and contradicted them. South Korea, by contrast, deferred everything to the scientists and experts.

Government is actually really well suited for solving problems like this because private industry and decentralized state and local governments can't, as they all have different priorities and motivations.

World War Two and the decades that followed were examples of high trust in the federal government, because it got so much done. It was concurrently a bright spot for capitalism, even when the fed programs were socialism in today's parlance. When the government and presidents lied about how Vietnam was going, that was the beginning of the end for American trust in government. Then Reagan threw gas on that fire by suggesting government was the root of all problems.

The worst part of this is that trust in government continued to decline for the last few years, while the same people full of distrust advocated for keeping its leader in place. How stupid is that?

So those full of distrust of the government were supposed to advocate for the guy who has been in government for almost 50 years?

All I really care about is not having a horse loose in the hospital. That keeps me up at night.

Given the number of people who voted for Joe who said their vote was more a vote against Don than it was for Joe, I think there are a lot of people who agree with that. And I think there is a lot of merit to it.

But in many ways, votes for Joe remind me of a Samsung Galaxy commercial years ago (I think it was for version 2 or 3). Apple fanboys were waiting outside the Apple store for the latest Iphone with one fanboy telling the group that he heard they were getting everything with this Iphone that they thought they were getting with the last iphone.

To the extent you believe that government has been a part of what ills the country over the past several decades (such as income wealth inequality, race relations, trust of government, etc), Joe was a big part of all of that because he has been in government for almost 50 years (and much of it in leadership positions not some junior staffer).

You're completely missing the point. Biden didn't create that mistrust. His tenure is not the source of mistrust. He didn't lie about Vietnam or inauguration size or the pandemic or voter fraud. His record is hardly clean, and he was far from my first choice, but you're trying to make the same ridiculous moral equivalence arguments that Trump supporters make. Biden has been pretty forthcoming about policy mistakes, especially with regard to criminal justice. That sure seems like a trust-building action to me.

The official GOP playbook has been, for 40 years, "Don't trust the government, unless I'm the government." That stands in stark contrast to the post WWII government of, "We can elevate this country as individuals working with strong investment in government." History is really clear about that: This the period of time when the interstate system was built, and marginal tax rates were high on the rich. The outcomes were extraordinary for most people and this is when the American middle class because the ideal we still talk about.

I would say the GOP playbook is worse than that, it's "don't trust the government, period. " The genius of this as a platform is that the more badly they run things, the more it supports their message not to trust the government.

GoBucks89 said:

Joe was a big part of all of that because he has been in government for almost 50 years (and much of it in leadership positions not some junior staffer).

You mean all of it... he was elected senator at 30, then vice president at 66.

"But if we've learned anything from the pandemic, it's that experience and expertise is the enemy." <rolls eyes>