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The COVID-19 Class War
Just a heads up about a Peggy Noonan column that’s right on the money:
It’s not that those in red states don’t think there’s a pandemic. They’ve heard all about it! They realize it will continue, they know they may get sick themselves. But they also figure this way: Hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy taken down, which would mean millions of other casualties, economic ones. Or, hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy is damaged but still stands, in which case there will be fewer economic casualties—fewer bankruptcies and foreclosures, fewer unemployed and ruined.
They’ll take the latter. It’s a loss either way but one loss is worse than the other. They know the politicians and scientists can’t really weigh all this on a scale with any precision because life is a messy thing that doesn’t want to be quantified.
The deep state denizens, or overclass, or whatever you want to call them, are reverting to type. Coddled all their lives, they want to hide under the bed when things get tough. Ordinary people want to carry on because they know what hardship is.
Published in Domestic Policy
Agreed.
Agreed. With O’Connor, Reagan had four tests. The new justice had to be (a) a woman, (b) a lady, (c) a Republican and (d) a conservative. Reagan got three and a half out of four. O’Connor was much more conservative than the liberal bloc, but not as conservative as I would have preferred.
Kennedy was Reagan’s third choice after the Democrats execrable campaign against Bork.
Also, Reagan elevated Rehnquist to Chief Justice, a great appointment.
With the Democrats taking over the Senate, lots of luck in getting them confirmed.
Zafar, the problem is the lack of empirical support. From the reports that I’ve read, the health system is not overwhelmed, it is underwhelmed. Many providers are facing layoffs and bankruptcy because they do not have enough business.
Directionally, your argument makes sense. Slow the spread = fewer infections = fewer hospitalizations. But the key issue is how many fewer, and this requires empirical evidence, which is lacking. No one seems to have any idea how much lockdowns, or other measures, reduce the rate of spread of the infection.
What we do know is that, with very few exceptions, there has been nothing approaching the overwhelming of the health care system. Quite the opposite.
Would repeated testing increase the empirical evidence that we need? (That is a rhetorical question, of course it would.)
The hospitals are being underwhelmed because we are slowing the spread. Health care workers are being laid off, and hospitals are in danger of closing.
Kristi Noem, Governor of South Dakota?
Actually the talk I hear is daily testing. The innovation in tests will probably mean testing that takes a few minutes to confirm either way whether you have it or not.
The problem is, it’s going to take too much time to reach that level of testing, and the fear mongers are demanding we don’t open up until we achieve it.
That assertion is untenable. And this virus isn’t so deadly as to be an existential crisis. We’ve hit the beach (to use a combat metaphor). The best way to survive is to move forward, not stay in place.
The worst places hit are nursing homes and assisted living facilities. By definition, those residents are already isolated. Outside of the New York metropolitan area, it’s roughly 2/3’s of the casualties. We can learn from those and protect them.
Everyone else can make their own decisions on what they want to do. I’m going out. Without a mask where I can get away with it.
Yes, my implication was Margaret Thatcher, or a woman cut of that cloth. Noem makes the cut.
Well said.
I don’t get the fetishized reliance on mass testing. We should be circling the wagons around the vulnerable. We should test the hell out of medical workers, care givers and the vulnerable. It is simply not feasible to test everybody else as often as would be needed to somehow isolate the infected in time to prevent an ongoing spread in the general population who are at marginal risk as it is.
It bears repeating that most people who get this thing don’t get horribly ill. I do know people who have had it. It wasn’t fun. (They, by the way, knew they had it because they were the ones whose symptoms were bad enough to be obvious). I get that. I also get that there are things about this virus that freak people out—including people who know about viruses.
But we aren’t going to come up with a magic bullet on this one. Not soon, anyway.
Meanwhile, there’s the economy. And you can only run on fumes so long.
I said to someone the other day that I’d be a lot more comfortable with the economic ker-splat we’re looking at if the deficit wasn’t already in the range of a bazillion bazillion. If we didn’t have much of a deficit, then we could offer to take out the big, giant Mastercard and pay for the world to shut down. But we’ve already charged a whole lot of pretty stuff on the Mastercard…and believe it or not, other emergencies might come along. Heck, this might not even be the worst virus to come at us. The next one —which could come next year, why not?—might be even scarier, more lethal, more transmissible, more worthy of a shut-down, only we’ll have used up our shut-down allowance.
Meanwhile, here’s a teeny-weenie personal potential problem: I am overdue for my annual skin check. (I’m pasty, and have a family history of skin cancer that makes a preventive removal of the entire face area at least as rational as Angelina’s prophylaxtic mastectomies). Well, skin checks are…what’s the word? Non-essential.
Okay, fine. I don’t like getting naked in front of a dermatologist wearing an Opti-Visor anyhow. But if I turn out to have melanoma, or lose most of my nose to basal cell carcinoma, because everything other than Coronavirus is “non-essential…?” And I’m a lucky ducky compared to the hip surgeries, kidney stones, transplants and whatnot that have been postponed indefinitely, while many hospitals and many, many healthcare providers are sitting around, empty and idle, waiting for the patients that aren’t coming.
Skin check by Zoom? Oh dear, that would be awkward.
The whole thing is awkward!
My previous dermatologist was very aggressive. My only achievements in the field of deliberate weight loss emerged from my trips to the skin lady who, between face-lifts and Botox injections, removed half a pound or more of me at every visit.
Then I started going to a different doctor. They don’t like to criticize each other, but the new guy compresses his lips as he contemplates the small, white scars from all those better-safe-than-sorry excisions.
It’s a new thing. Nobody knows how much easing a lockdown would increase the rate of spread either. Frankly, it is all conjecture because we have limited information which would allow us to fine tune this.
But the staged re-opening kabuki is based on the illusion of fine-tuning and control. Bans on the purchase of garden supplies but not lottery tickets was fine-tuning at its worst.
No politician is gonna say “… we still don’t know much but we locked down for as long as we could and longer than the experts originally suggested…” even though that is the truth. Nor will anybody say “The bug may come back a bit but we think not as bad. Do what you can to be safe.“
Instead they will act as if leaving us alone is actually Doing Something and part of Comprehensive Plan. It is to be expected. It is the nature of the beast regardless of party. Pointlessly gradual lifting will be a key part of the illusion.
Yes, I think it’s a version of security theatre and undertaken for the same reason.
One of the wildest things I saw this past week was a map of where wealthy New Yorkers fled to. They didn’t flee to rural America where, in most cases, they would see less exposure. They fled to highly populated areas like Southern Florida, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Chicago. People are actually willing to trade some risk to their health to insulate themselves from those they see as unwashed and uncultured.
what percent of covid patients require hospitalization?
I’ve read anywhere between 1 and 5 percent
the director of LA county public health has a salary = 418,000
not including bonuses (for what I have no idea)
No MD
She has a PhD in social welfare.
Barbara Ferrer – this is the person LA county is relying on to lift the lockdown