That's horrible news. Just canceled my visit to Chicago this weekend on hearing the news. So no money being spent by me in Chicago again.

Not sure the city will be able to survive this.

Your right. Multiply this by the 1000's to 10,000's every day since the shutdown until when ever it opens back up I do wonder it the city will ever be the same again.

Oh, dear. And think of the empty hospital wards, morgues and funeral homes.

Also, you were planning on hitting the bars this weekend? Who does that in the middle of a pandemic? Is that before or after your parachute-free skydiving lesson?

Cool story Lori

https://img.particlenews.com/img/id/...mbnail_800x600


And of course I will hit the bars, most of Wisconsin is open and unafraid luckily. The boarder towns are making hands over fists taking flatlanders money....

Illinois will be the last state to open out of spite and the first one to go bankrupt begging for mercy.

And you are the reason that the U.S. is the joke of the planet, people are dying and the economy is sunk.

If you really valued bar-hopping, you would actually follow health guidelines, so quasi-normalcy could be restored, as in Europe, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. But flouting guidelines and common sense prolongs the economic and social misery.

Bar-hopping, in the middle of a pandemic, is idiotic.

Yesterday, Brazil crossed the 80,000 deaths barrier. Today, São Paulo state will cross the 20,000 mark. At this pace, within 20 days (around Aug 10th), Brazil will cross the 100,000 victims mark.

The first hit regions have passed the peak (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, some Amazon and Northeast states), but they still have lots of casualties. On the other hand, regions that were spared (South and Central-West states, upstate São Paulo, Minas Gerais) are now watching a big spike on the number of deaths.

7-day moving death average is just above 1,000/day for almost two months now, with no signs of receding.

OMG open the bars now!

Or here's an idea... stifle your desire to get publically hammered for a few months while there's a pandemic happening so we can ALL get back to normal and go out to bars again.

And shortsighted enough to not understand that if we all simply laid low for a month. we'd well on our way in returning to normalcy; i.e., returning to bars without the guilt or risk.

It doesn't work that way. We have been laying low for over 4 months....

It is not going away. We have to live with it and get over it.





https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/21...our-only-hope/


Without A Real Coronavirus Vaccine, Herd Immunity Is Our Only Hope

The Federalist ^ | July 21, 2020| Joy Pullman



Herd immunity is exactly what the spike in cases indicates is developing, and we need it to continue.


Politicians have been reimposing and maintaining lockdowns and mask mandates due to media furor over “spikes” in coronavirus cases. This has happened in 21 states and many more localities, says The New York Times. One of the many problems with this is that the nation needs people to keep getting coronavirus.

That’s because coronavirus spread is a natural vaccine that protects those who survive — which is the vast majority — and even those who don’t catch it, through herd immunity. This natural vaccine is our only antidote to the virus until a manufactured vaccine can be made, a process that experts say is still at least a year away, and possibly as many as four years or even never.

As an article in The National Interest by two researchers put it, “The Coronavirus Will Be With Us For Years to Come.” The article notes that plain physical realities will likely prevent any vaccine from being widely available for possibly four years:


...

That’s even if an effective vaccine can be found. Coronaviruses are notoriously difficult to pre-empt with vaccines.



We vaccinate because the more people who develop resistance to a disease, the more likely a disease is to fade or die from lack of hosts. This is called herd immunity. Herd immunity can be developed by vaccinating widely, or from people getting a disease and surviving it, or some combination of the two.

Since we do not have a vaccine anywhere in our near future, if at all, the only other public health strategy we have for reducing the coronavirus toll is for as many people as possible to get and survive it. This was part of the rationale behind the “flatten the curve” campaign that baited Americans into lockdowns until it was switched out for “any spread of the disease justifies locking down every activity forever,” a criterion we do not use for any other risk on the planet.

Further, the current increase in coronavirus cases while the rate of coronavirus deaths declines may suggest either that some amount herd immunity has beeen reached, our massive increase in testing is showing the disease to be far less dangerous than we at first thought, or some combination of the two.

Regardless, the latest infection “spike” has not been accompanied by a massive death spike, which means the lethality of this disease is registering significantly lower than it did three months ago. A rise in cases without a matching increase in deaths is something we should celebrate, not least because it likely protects more elderly and other vulnerable people from death due to rising immunity.


… graph the 7-day-rolling average of US Covid deaths against the number of new positive tests 10 and 16 days before. As you can see, in March/April, deaths followed cases closely; now deaths have hardly moved despite a huge rise in cases…

...



As “flatten the curve” implies, keeping people hiding in their basements slows the progression of the virus to essentially bail out hospitals that put much, much more energy into pushing for monopolies on taxpayer dollars than preparing for a pandemic they knew was coming. Maintaining virus spread below local health-care capacity may be reasonable. But attempting to stop coronavirus altogether is idiotic.

Yet that’s what politicians and the media indicate is their new goal. The proof is their wild reactions to the health necessity of increased coronavirus cases, which are now occurring while the nation continues to have huge amounts of excess hospital and other health-care capacity.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom locked down his state again earlier this month, reversing an economic reopening for the world’s fifth-largest economy. Yesterday he banned schools in most of the state, including private schools, from offering in-person instruction for months to millions of children.

Numerous cities have taken similar steps, ... This will make working nearly impossible for the parents of all these children, further crippling local economies....

Many small businesses that survived the first lockdowns, at least for now, will not survive the second, nor will they survive media fearmongering keeping people from frequenting businesses and schools even in states with technically looser rules. Small businesses are the nation’s economic engine and employ nearly half the working population. Untold thousands of people will get sick and die if we engineer another Great Depression that causes people to lose health insurance and the ability to pay medical bills and get care for chronic conditions.

Lockdowns themselves also increase the death toll by delaying herd immunity.

“[I]f we stop the quarantine for all low-risk people now, herd immunity would develop more quickly,” wrote an academic physician in April for The Federalist. Herd immunity is exactly what the spike in cases indicates is developing, and we need it to continue. The alternative is not just economic and consequently national suicide from tanking an economy already running on quantitative easing, it’s actually more deaths, the physician pointed out:


A full quarantine will result in the deaths of more elderly and medically ill people because more of them will become infected. A partial quarantine [of at-risk people] would likely result in a greater number of mild infections in young and healthy individuals upfront (but not total).

...

Look, we have two main options for managing this disease. One is to keep everyone in their homes indefinitely — not for the initially promised two weeks, not for the later promised few months, but indefinitely.

The second is to protect high-risk people while the rest of us more or less go about our business and check into the hospital if we pick the coronavirus lottery ticket that gives us worse symptoms than the overwhelming majority of those stricken so far.

Staying home indefinitely is not a viable option for anyone who is not independently wealthy. We can pretend we are independently wealthy by stealing trillions from other people’s children, at least for a while, like Americans do now. But there is a natural limit to that also, and we have reached it ….

It’s time to get back to life and stop pretending it’s possible to hide from this virus. We are all going to get it, sooner or later, and we have to. The herd immunity this will produce, far more than masks, is what will really protect the vulnerable.

No. We haven't. Otherwise we wouldn't have this:

https://www.sltrib.com/resizer/nGPek...426HNY4SGI.jpg

yes, nazism was a popular fad in canada and elsewhere too before the war.


https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/...o-nazi-groups/

Almost all retail stores are now open here including malls. You are required to wear a mask when in indoor public places, with a few exceptions like bars and restaurants where you can take off your mask once seated if you remain seated.

I went shopping for a few things with one of my kids over the weekend.

After wearing the mask the whole time (about 2 hours), my guess is that leisurely shopping without a specific purpose in mind ("just to see what's there") is going to go the way of the dodo.

It's not really pleasant wearing a mask unless you really have to, so my guess is that - if I may be sexist - the male way of shopping is going to prevail over the female way of shopping for the next little while.

Some are saying mask wearing is here to stay and it may for those who wish to on their own (such as in Asia) but I think most people won't tolerate it a year from now and it will have a detrimental economic effect.

It's like a certain group of people heard the phrase "herd immunity", latched onto it, and then refuse to update their ideological positions as more is learned. In case this author has been under a rock for two months, the biggest news about covid-19, other than the U.S.'s completely fumbled response to it, is that there isn't a lot of scientific support that "herd immunity" will save us. The level of antibodies developed after an infection apparently diminishes pretty rapidly. And there are some well publicized cases already of people being infected twice.

Wow bnk, you REALLY REALLY don't have a clue.

You're listing excuses to justify selfishness and death.

Good News? Hard, necessary decisions, but not "good news" IMO.

Gotta agree with everybody else here.

Bnk, it sucks, but we really do have take certain steps to get this under control.

1. Indoor bars simply have to close for a while. Perhaps 1 month. Bar owners are definitely screwed.. They will go out of business. I truly feel bad for them

2. Masks should be mandatory everywhere where social distancing isn't allowed. Trump may not be able to mandate it legally, but he should set the example by pushing for it with public messaging. He didn't. He dropped the ball, and he will politically pay the price

3. A lot more businesses can be open than you think. With masks and social distancing, people can still do a lot that we couldn't do back in March and April. But failure to universally wear masks and maintain social distancing is the biggest problem, not any mandates from our leaders.

I think it was insensitive for SIGSEGV to day that.

It's "good news" in regards to stopping the spread of Covid.

But it's bad news for the many decent and honest people who run a bar as a business, and depend on that income.