I think personally that my 90 year old parents are quite reasonably safe if they wish to travel from their house to my house, spend the day with us, and then travel home afterward in the current situation. I just looked it up and at last count the number of people who are reported as being infected with Coronavirus in the postal codes along their 20 mile route route is roughly 50 in total, depending on how wide a swath you count, including both those hospitalized and otherwise. I don’t think they ran into any of them riding along with the windows rolled up. One has to be rational in a challenging situation, look at the real situation, and not succumb to stupidity in managing your own risk or anger or envy in judging others.
You’re probably aware of it, but I’ll mention it anyway that the rental remodeling work I’m having done is entirely unrestricted under current state directives, including those of your own state, being covered under critical infrastructure provisions. In my case 90% of the work is being done by one guy in an unfurnished and empty house. Also FYI my travel to and from that job site is likewise strictly covered by those provisions, as is my day job, as is my wife’s day job. So try not to get too excited, if you can manage it 
Also, to address your, shall we say, discomfort directly, the University of Washington data says there are twice as many ICU beds in my area as is necessary to accommodate this situation, including the worst case going forward, and five times as many hospital beds in general.
BTW, the one area where I think the US Federal government intervention has a useful effect on this situation is in funding biotech research. That is an ongoing activity that isn’t dependent on spraying money in a fast paced and inefficient way – the money that will address this virus is probably mostly under contract. I’d be surprised if any vaccine that comes along doesn’t have a component of US Federal research money in its development.
Can the “personal” attacks be moved to another forum, e.g. facebook?
It doesn’t help that – across all mainstream social media – the bulk of personal attacks are written by people on the left of the political spectrum, so the mod ends up in an impossible position.
The mod policy here is to not edit posts (except for admin reasons) but to remove them whole if there is a direct personal attack etc.
Honestly this whole thread has deteriorated to a stream of rants by doom merchants on one hand and America-can-do-no-wrong-ists on the other. It’s a shame, because there are also informed people who have a lot of intelligent and interesting things to say (which is why I do take a look at it from time to time), but now they are lost in the noise. Time to close it imo.
A lot of “technology” forums have been running “virus” threads and some have shut them down, too.
I will leave this one for a bit longer but will close it if we get any more trouble.
It would be a shame to lose the thread as I’ve generally found it an interesting read.
We’re living through an historically significant time, and in recent history totally unprecidented levels of state control / lockdown. As best we can tell just because of poor standards and behaviour of a single country.
Silvaire wrote:
I don’t what a “good job” would be. I don’t think the US state and Federal Governments have performed a particularly useful function (“a good job”) in relation to Corona Virus, and I think it’s a naive fallacy that they could (or should) do so.
Let’s drop the government for a while. Do you agree that effective handling of an epidemic like this would require some coordination at a level above individual communities? If yes, who or what would provide that coordination? If not, why not?
I can well imagine that your particular location in a relatively sparsly populated area of the US makes you less affected by the epidemic than many other are. But what about people who don’t have that luxury? Not caring what happens to them is much too randian for my taste.
(Note: I’m not overly fond of governments myself, but from a political standpoint quite different from yours.)
The ideological BS aside, I think there is still a valid point: The current anti corona measures apply to everyone in a country regardless of the population density and amount of social contacts between the citizens. They apply equally to cities with millions of inhabitants as to university towns where heavy partying is expected each -weekend-day as to rural villages with 150 souls or so. The inhabitants of the latter probably have less social contacts in normal times than the university students with the lock-down in place. On the other hand, laws are almost always one size fits all and you just can’t make a different law for every town in a country.
I find it hard to beleive one can claim they are that far away from the action, given high transimission rate the virus it will (read has to) touch 70%-80% of population, the question is simply when? with no control 4months, with some control about 12months and with vaccines we are talking 24months, so I think everybody should be concerned about the need for action, especially coordinated collective ones and tailored ones with some risk appetite
I don’t think anyone posting in EuroGA on a keyboard is less impacted than amazon natives:
Given how tricky viruses are to vaccinate against and that it is likely to mutate before a vaccine comes out is it worth pinning our hopes on?
Clipperstorch wrote:
you just can’t make a different law for every town in a country
Which is the beauty of the Swedish (and, to an extent, Swiss) approach. It is not “pretend as if nothing is wrong”, but also not trying to regulate every minute detail of people’s lives. Rather explain to them the issue at hand, the measures required, and recommend what they can do to help. Then count on their common sense and to a degree social control rather than fines or putting people in a prison cell with 30 others for failure to “socially distance” (I think this happened in NYC).
I spoke with someone who has to go from Germany to southern France for work. When he comes back, he will be forced into quarantine for 14 days, since the whole of France is considered a “high risk area”. At the same time, every day thousands of workers cross into the same area of Germany from Alsace, the most affected area in France. Try to explain that. Closing borders is at this stage a purely symbolic act with no epidemiological benefit and should be abandoned as quickly as possible, as the outbreak has never stopped at country borders. It is just something for politicians to show they are “doing something” and that the problem really comes from elsewhere.
Although in Switzerland we’ve gone too far in some areas, e.g. closing schools and parks was probably never necessary in order to prevent an overload of ICU beds. Also it sickens me to read that people are calling the police when they hear someone playing with a ball outside. But I understand it is unpatriotic to question these things and makes you guilty of wanting to murder the elderly.
