Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

I know that is how it works.

But this is exactly the ammo that folks are looking for to prove that science really doesn't know what is going on. Maybe if we would have started with masks at the very beginning of this thing people would have been more receptive to them. Now "we" have done a 180. People don't like that.

Widespread scientific illiteracy probably isn't helping.

Jeff said:

Who said they were of no use?

WHO

Who's on first?

The context that there was a severe shortage of masks and that WHO recommended you save them for healthcare providers is a pretty important bit of context, no?

ApolloAndy said:

At first we thought it was primarily transmitted by surface contact and now we have better evidence that it's transmitted by particles in the air. We created a new understanding through hypothesis, experiment, observation, and analysis which may later be refined.

The lack of listening to or trying to understand the fluid nature of science is frustrating as hell. As I said earlier in this or another thread, the business where I work opened this week and we are spending a fortune on labor and supplies cleaning surfaces. I would estimate that less than 5% of our visitors are wearing masks (recommended, but not required). There's no telling how much money we would have saved if we had given out free masks and required them versus wiping down every hard surface every 30 minutes or less. But there's no way we would have done that because this is Texas where some people think that big government is having a paid fire department and that, despite it being swamp ass hot here for 10 months out of the year, requiring masks will put far more people in the hospital for heat stroke than any virus.

Time for some good news that has come from this pandemic: the Cannonball Run record has been broken seven times since this all started.

Blaming Trump would be a partisan knee jerk reaction. (And as much as I disagree with nearly everything Trump does, I do sometimes get fed up by the "if Trump did it, it must be the worst thing ever" crowd.)

There is the tendency I referenced. By definition it means it doesn't apply to everyone. And not everyone takes a my team versus your team view of politics. But that doesn't mean the tendency doesn't exist. Or that it wouldn't exist with Hillary as president or didn't exist with Obama in office. And interestingly enough, the tendency applies to some of the people who deny it the most. Wonder if I need to define "some of the people?" LOL

Science should not define policy, but policy should not ignore science.

Initial statement here was science was leading the decision making. As I noted I don't think that was or should be the case. But I also don't think that policy is ignoring science here. Though I understand some people disagree with that. If you took a poll, I am confident the numbers would break along party lines and/or support/opposition to Trump. Tendency again.

I honestly still cannot figure out what our plan as a country is. Can anyone tell me what it is?

We don't have a national plan. We discussed in a few pages back. Not sure it makes sense to have one given diversity of the country (demographics, population densities, economics, health systems, etc). Things that appear to help. Authoritative federal government. Having been burned by prior outbreaks. Weak to no state/local governments. Strong faith in government (especially federal government). Bipartisan politics. Island nation. Good leadership.

US has none of those. And (tendency statement here) we haven't (ever with respect to some of them) and for a long time for others. Not sure I see de Blasio ceding an economy about the size of Canada's to a republican president (he spared somewhat with his own governor). Or LA's mayor in terms of an economy the size of Australia. Nor would Texas do that with a dem president. Was always going to be about politics in the US.

Jeff said:

context, no?

No. Pretty hard to argue against the first sentence...

"There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly," Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program...

"There also is the issue that we have a massive global shortage," Ryan said about masks and other medical supplies. "Right now the people most at risk from this virus are frontline health workers who are exposed to the virus every second of every day. The thought of them not having masks is horrific." Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, an infectious disease epidemiologist with the WHO, also said at Monday's briefing that it is important "we prioritize the use of masks for those who need it most," which would be frontline health care workers. "In the community, we do not recommend the use of wearing masks unless you yourself are sick and as a measure to prevent onward spread from you if you are ill," Van Kerkhove said.

In other words, since a mask doesn't do anything for a healthy person, then we shouldn't wear them. Let the hospital workers have them.

At a minimum, if masks were felt to be of use at that time couldn't they have told us to make our own like what happened about a month ago? There was almost an entire cottage industry devoted to making masks for the general population.

Don't get me wrong, I am not against masks. I have been wearing one in public since March 20. It's frustrating to have science make such a definitive statement and then completely reverse course. That is what erodes peoples confidence in science.

And yes, I know that science once said the earth was flat, until better science proved that wrong. It seems like well more than a month into this thing science would have had a better understanding of how this is transmitted.

And I'm with you bigboy. Article after article talks about all of the deep cleaning that is taking place. I saw an article today saying that a food processing plant was closed down for a deep cleaning after one person tested positive for it. Nothing wrong with cleaning, but it seems like a whole lot of resources are being expended for a minimal decrease in risk. The masks seem to be way more bang for the buck.

Although I am not complaining that the trash cans outside various local stores are cleaner today than they have been in decades...a lot of this cleaning probably makes no difference in terms of spreading virus, but on the other hand it is nice that the world is a slightly cleaner place...

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

They supposedly "deep clean" our offices each night now. I would just be happy if they cleaned them as I saw no evidence that was done pre-covid. There is an element of theater to it all in terms of helping make people feel comfortable coming back. Masks were in short supply at one point (knew Chinese nationals sending them back home to family in China before shortages here with returned favors once they became scarce here and plentiful in China). But at this point, they appear to be plentiful in the US again. Got one at work but wear the ones I bought myself because I am more used to them.

GoBucks89 said:

Was always going to be about politics in the US.

I wholeheartedly disagree with this. Good leadership unites people across party lines, especially in times of national crisis. GWB's approval went from 51% to 81% after 9/11, by just not being a giant a$$. Trump's barely moved more than 5 points.

Even with all the ridiculous nonsense that Trump did to undermine his leadership prior, all he had to do was say,

"This is awful, and it will be scary, but we will get through it together. Democrat, Republican, Independent - it's time to set aside partisan division and unite. Look out for your neighbor. Take care of each other. It will be scary and difficult, but we're America and America is great, now more than ever before. We've been through worse and we have the best minds in the world coming up with a plan which will keep us safe and leave us stronger when we emerge. E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. God bless you and God bless the United States of America."

I guarantee you that would have been better for the fate of the country, people's deference to his authority to govern, and for his re-election chances and I wrote that in 10 minutes sitting at my computer.

It may have been better. But its not clear by how much. I don't think it would have been anything approaching the bump that W got after 9/11. To use a parlance of this thread, there has been exponential growth in partisanship in the 18+ years since. Look at the fact that Trump was even elected. Or that Bill Clinton and Obama would have been questioned as being liberal enough to be on a debate stage in the dem primaries several months back (which now seems like a couple years ago). And the now is not the time for politics speeches have been made multiple times with various issues but they don't work. So just like I don't think you can take the same approach in different circumstances and produce the same result, I don't think you can get the same results in a partisan climate that is very much different.

I disagree that non-a$$hat Trump wouldn't have gotten a huge bump in approval (the vaunted triple negative). People want guidance, they want leadership, they want to know there's a plan. Speeches may not work in other arenas and they obviously aren't actual solutions, but speeches absolutely work in crisis because people want to be reassured.

Also, you say that partisanship is growing as if it's some independent force. There are almost certainly aspects of it that are fueled by things like social media, 24 cable news, the increasing split between urban and rural, and such, but if your reaction to everything in your presidency is to blame, attack, and scapegoat the other team, then you reap what you, at least in part, sowed. I never heard Obama, GWB, Clinton, or GHWB call their opponents names, accuse them of treason, threaten them with the apparatus of government, threaten to lock them up, etc. etc. If Trump had done something totally out of character and acted presidentially, I think he would have seen a 15+ point bump in approval, but I'm not at all surprised that he chose to attack everyone instead.

I've been arguing this now for almost four years. We are not simply witnessing the same behavior with the other side in charge. Accusing a talk show host of murder, threatening to withhold funding to states in a global crisis, trying to force tech companies to play along with his propagation of lies... and this is just in the last week. We're at the 100k count for fatalities in the US, and there's zero messaging about it. You can't with a straight face say that any president in our lifetime, going back to Ford, would have behaved this way. The moral equivalence does not exist.

I am pondering whether you could extend that back to Nixon (who may or may not be in your lifetime, but anyway...)

The conclusion I arrived at is a variation of the old political axiom, "if the argument is about you, you lose." You don't really want to be having an argument about whether you're better or worse than Nixon.

Can your feces be the key to coronavirus detection?

Since I made the Billy Madison poop joke back in the day (since April feels like "back in the day")

When reading about plans for the fall for various colleges, monitoring waste water was something that was mentioned to help identify outbreaks in dorms. Not sure if they can make that work and get it in place by the time students come back to campus.

This thread has become my Coronavirus update dumping ground.

Here's an NPR article talking about new studies of the virus and how the more we test, the lower we keep estimating the fatality rate to be.

And it seems we're finally starting to consider the vastly different risks between age demographics:

Studies suggest a healthy young person's chance of dying from an infection is less than 1 in 1,000. But for someone in poor health in their 90s, it can be greater than 1 in 10.

The team puts the infection fatality rate for the U.S. at somewhere between 0.7% and 1.2%. In New York, for example, an antibody study indicated the state has an infection fatality rate around 0.5%. Indiana's infection fatality rate turned out to be about 0.58%, or roughly one death for every 172 people who got infected. But even a virus with a fatality rate less than 1% presents a formidable threat, Rivers says. "That is many times more deadly than seasonal influenza," she says.

Oh, and the WHO is still telling us not to wear masks unless you're caring for somewone with COVID-19 or coughing and sneezing yourself: