Looks like there's more 100+ year-olds dying than people 40-49.

Teachers, get back to work.

We really need to make it a national priority here in the US to speed vaccine delivery.

There was Operation Warp Speed for creating the vaccine, and I think it did amazingly well. Now we need an “operation warp speed” for getting shots into arms.

So far performance has been pitiful and hit or miss. I have relatives in other places who had their shots weeks ago, meanwhile my parents are languishing at home and aren’t being given any appointments no matter who they call

Yet still by June there wasn't an effective way to treat COVID and Florida had still largely escaped the depths of COVID at the beginning. Since the fall Florida is still warm, Illinois is not. Everything is indoors in Illinois and COVID spreads much easier in cold dry air.

Also there are so many factors with COVID and different variants.

Your original statements was mocking people in Chicago wearing masks after your visit to home in Arkansas. And you claimed Arkansas did better than Illinois.


You keep on changing the goal posts.

The original reply stands.

When people suggest that it's harder to contain Covid in an urban setting than in a rural one, I'm really not sure that it's not the other way around. In an urban area, it's easier to work from home (the type of jobs available are more likely to lend themselves to this), and much easier to get food and items delivered to your door (instead of having to go in your car and drive to a public place where you'll have to touch lots of things and interact with other humans in order to acquire your necessities of life).

Think about it: the density at which it starts to matter for spreading Covid (>1 person per couple square meters) is WAY above the densities of any inhabited floor plans in Western democracies; no urban area in those countries is so extremely "urban" that you can't easily respect social distancing if you choose to.

Now, sure, if you have slums where there's 15 people crammed into a 2br/1ba apt, yes, that kind of density starts to have a bearing on the discussion.

But for a place like the USA, I'd say it's likely harder, all factors considered, to contain Covid in rural areas than it is in cities.

Not until they are vaccinated. There are teachers with co-morbidities and of all ages. I have three good teacher friends who are 50+

Many factors tend to be pluses for urban vs. rural, and vice versa.

Rural people might tend to shop less often because they have bigger homes and go to big box stores vs. neighborhood stores. Urban people often shop for groceries once or twice a week, get lots of takeout, etc. Stocking up on anything is a new concept for many of us, or at least for me.

In any case, numbers for Illinois are far better than for Arkansas lately.

And the West Coast is obviously doing way better than average. California is a bit better, and Washington and especially Oregon are outstanding in relative terms. Seattle for one is doing great, despite having the first then-known US outbreak. Leadership has played a big role in this.

I wouldn't go that far. Some of the worst outbreaks in the country were in relatively rural states. North Dakota and South Dakota had the two worst outbreaks per capita (as of today), and they are two of the least urban states in the country. Illinois is the only large state (top 10 by population) that makes the top 20 of cases per capita; it is exactly #20 (as of today). Arkansas has the 8th worst outbreak so far.

For big states, Florida isn't doing that great. It ranks 6th in number of cases among big states. That list ordered from least severe to most severe outbreak:

Michigan
Pennsylvania
North Carolina
Ohio
New York
Florida
California
Texas
Georgia
Illinois

As for whether lockdowns work, clearly they do when done properly. You can go to the CDC's website and see total deaths of any cause per month per state in 2019 and 2020 (only through Sept 2020 so far). Comparing the monthly deaths in 2019 v 2020, you can clearly see when the outbreak starts in each state and when it subsides. It clearly starts in New York in February/March and is brought under control around June. In fact, half of all deaths in NYS from January - October happened in March, April and May. A quarter of them in April alone.

We're agreeing. The low-regulation states have frequently been shitshows in the post-May numbers, while the high-reg states have typically done well..

As soon as they've been vaccinated, yes.

But of course you don't give a rat's ass about vaccinations. All you want is for everything to be back open at 100% in order for you to live your life without restriction.

Aaron (Glowrock)

I completely and totally agree with you on this one, tup. The faster we can get shots into arms of the majority of Americans, the sooner we can get back to "normal", whatever the hell that is nowadays. We truly needed a NATIONAL versus a STATE response to this. The National Guard should have been used for vaccine distribution, honestly.

Seems things are getting at least a little better in terms of the amount of vaccine actually available, but the actual process of getting vaccinated is still too damned difficult for many right now.

Aaron (Glowrock)

If there is one thing that covid-19 has taught us... one of the many lessons from the Covid teacher, is that we as a society need to get healthier. Too many folks out there with pre-existing conditions and health issues. We have an unhealthy society.

So let's recap with some of the lessons that nature, the greatest teacher, has taught us:

1) We are not prepared for something bigger
2) Our govt is dysfunctional
3) Too many unhealthy folks out there
4) anti-science mentality is rampant
5) supply lines are an issue
6) when we put our minds to it, things like vaccines can come quick
7) It has taught us about hygiene
8) The pandemic has resulted in an increase in divorces, so it has taught us to possibly not jump the gun with someone until one is ready
9) Has taught that the economic system is that simple to break down
10) A social safety net is really needed or needs improvement

And many more lessons. Let's just hope they stick around, the teachings!

Teachers aren't a special class.

How about the workers who have been working outside the home for the last year get the vaccine first?

Absolutely. All of this.

And they should have been made a priority but teachers were sent home and now parents whose kids are failing their Zoom classes and politicians want them all to return to work before vaccines have been rolled out.

To be honest, I don’t agree that teachers returning to work should require vaccination before hand. The CDC isn’t saying that, and there is already data from places where schools have been open showing that transmissions in schools has been very low if they follow the correct protocols. I do think that that is a BS talking point coming from the unions.

Furthermore, that is a slap in the face to us essential workers who have been out there dealing face to face with people since March, 2020 (healthcare workers, grocery workers, construction, utility workers, real estate agents, police and fire, etc etc) and whose lives have been completely turned upside down because we cannot rely on our kids going to school and had to scramble to figure out how to manage. We showed up to our jobs WITHOUT a vaccine for nearly a year.

So I’m sorry, but I don’t have sympathy for teachers who are under 65 and healthy who are still trying to get out of showing up for work today, in Feb 2021, knowing what we know. And the major healthcare policy-making bodies largely concur with me.

11) Anti-Asian mentality is rampant, and the pandemic has resulted in an increase in racist attacks against Asians

Who said anything about one-year lockdowns, staying indoors forever or wanting a miserable existence?

When this threat emerged, the UK, US and countless other countries were complacent, ignorant and slow in treating the unfolding situation with the seriousness that it required. The lack of early effective action gave the virus a beachhead and successive failures have enabled it to spread, and worst of all, facilitated the virus to adapt into variants that have increased levels of transmission.

As I stated previously, the virus does not have legs, it needs people to proliferate. If we had acted decisively early on, we could have got on top of this crisis and returned to some form of normality, like New Zealand has done. Instead, selfish inconsiderate individuals and incompetent administrations opted for a half-hearted effort that didn’t put out the flames. Therefore, we have the worst of all worlds, hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of unemployed, busted economies and businesses, and untold mental health damage. This was all completely unnecessary, and it drives me crazy that we are repeating the same mistakes and wondering why we continue to suffer the consequences.


Then you are a selfish ignorant fool.

Why wouldn’t we want to be like Australia? The death toll from Covid-19 in Australia is just north of 900; far lower than the daily tallies of many western nations, and new cases are limited to half a dozen a day. Australia got on top of this disaster, and therefore been able to return to a far greater level of normality. The pertinent question we should be asking of our governments and each other is why wouldn’t we want to replicate the actions of Australia to get back to normality!

The NHS is far from perfect, but this is not an accurate assessment of what happened. In the early days it was thought that critical care capacity would be overwhelmed, so it was decided to boost that capacity by delivering several thousand critical care beds with the construction of the Nightingale Hospitals. Yet they were never utilised in any meaningful capacity and mothballed. In what proved to be a catastrophic mistake, government guidance stipulated that patients should be discharged to care homes – even if they had tested positive – rather than moved to the Nightingale’s which were vacant. Compounding the problem in care homes was the slow response to limit outside visitor access, access to PPE, testing, etc… It was irrelevant how good care homes were if government policy was enabling the introduction and spread of a lethal virus.

Where government intervention has been limited, and the NHS took the lead – such as with the vaccine rollout – it has been a massive success.

:tup:

^ Yep. I think when the smoke is cleared, most sane people are going to look back and realize that the "lockdown perpetually" States got it wrong, and also let a REALLY BAD CAT out of the bag (ie allowing unilateral emergency orders from one person completely usurp personal liberties).

Florida is what I view to be a better example of how to handle things. And just for the record, I DO support mask wearing and social distancing.

It seems the US will reach the 500,000 deaths mark today: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

The brightside is the country is doing well delivering vaccines, so I hope the number of deaths to plunge on the next weeks ending this nightmare.

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Back in Brazil, it's Carnaval. Monday and Tuesday are holidays but all the street parties were cancelled. I keep attending restaurants and bars that strictly follow regulations. Masks are widely used everywhere. It's rare to see someone on streets not wearing them.

Actually, the incidents in the Bay area and in Chicago are mostly just criminals doing what they do. They seem to love to target elderly Chinese people.