Thursday, May 7, 2020

One million dead is not a fixable problem

If you don’t like Michigan weather wait a bit and it will change. Last Sunday the Detroit area set a record high of about 75F. Tonight or tomorrow night we might set a record low, into the 30s. So I was playing in the mud in the garage today, but it probably won’t be warm enough to do so tomorrow and Saturday.



I’ve written that the US Postal Service will likely run out of money in June. I’m sure this will help (NOT!). The nasty guy has appointed a new postmaster general. He is the finance chair of the Republican National Convention and has donated $2 million to GOP causes, including the nasty guy campaign, since 2016. Donate $2 million and you get to help wreck the government. I don’t want to see how much damage this guy could do from the inside.



The Department of Labor announced another 3.2 million people filed for unemployment over the last week. For eight weeks that’s 33.4 million.



Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has reopened his state. Cell phone data says that 62,000 people are visiting Georgia every day from neighboring states that still are in lockdown. Tired of takeout meals? There’s a restaurant just across the border. A good way to spread the virus in both directions.



Kos of Kos reported that Sweden hasn’t done a lockdown. Which makes for a nice control group. Yeah, their death count is rising. But they saved their economy, right?

No. Their economic contraction is expected to be about the same or worse compared to the countries around it that did a lockdown.



Bethany Mandel has gotten some internet infamy when she tweeted a thread complaining about being locked down and declaring “I am done.” A small part of what she wrote was the sentence, “You can call me a Grandma killer.” That prompted a great deal of derision.

Hunter of Daily Kos takes her seriously and explains what’s wrong with her reasoning.

The idea of the lockdown was to “flatten the curve” – which we’ve all heard about. And that was to give us time to ramp up testing and develop all the other protocols that other nations used successfully to curtail the spread of the virus.

Which didn’t happen. We still don’t have those tools.

We were told the lockdown would be only a few weeks. Now that it has been longer businesses are afraid they can’t survive. And their employees need those paychecks to maintain food and shelter. We need to reopen the economy.

Hunter wrote:
That would be terrible, but "businesses can't survive" is, in the end, a fixable problem. "One million Americans are dead" is not a fixable problem.

We can bring businesses back to life. The actual doctors, therapists, nurses, hairdressers, and day care workers—not so much. That is a magic not presently available to us.

Keeping those businesses on life support, however, would be (will be?) insanely expensive. Staggeringly. A true "survival" plan would be to pay all workers, pay businesses to stay closed, and make sure every small business can pay their bills until the reopening can happen. That would have been a superb—and even a relatively easy to accomplish—plan in March. With every passing week and month of screwuppery, however, it becomes exponentially more difficult and more expensive.

Americans have every right to be angry about that. The entire point of the shelter-in-place orders—the entire purpose behind shuttering businesses for weeks—was to limit the damage while the government bought a bit of time to react.

No? That didn't happen? Damn. Well, we're all out of ideas. Sucks to be you, everybody.

If people like Mandel were under the impression that the "lockdown" was going to last only a few weeks, they were lied to and need to take that out on the dishonest near-criminals who lied to them. If people like Mandel are angry that it was not handled "responsibly," then they should demand the appropriate penalties for the people who were irresponsible and get responsible people installed in their places.

But "I am done" does not result in a reopened economy that saves jobs and businesses and everybody lives happily ever after except for the human sacrifices piled up in the economy's various closets and spare rooms.



Meteor Blades tweeted:
Donald Trump and Mike Pence and Larry Kudlow should be handed shovels and forced to dig some of the graves they made inevitable by their rotten ongoing coronavirus response.



YS tweeted:
Pro Tip: If your state signals the end of stay-at-home orders; it doesn’t mean the pandemic is over, it just means they currently have room for you in the ICU.
Blythe and Dogs added:
... it also means there's room in the morgue.
Malkazoid replied:
They have room for you in the ICU for now. If you want that bed, you might want to get your covid19 early and beat the rush.
And Paulus V:
Not necessarily. What it does mean is that your government thinks that reopening the economy will get them more votes than the ones they lose as a result of the increase in COVID-19 deaths.



It’s been a few years since we’ve had a president with a sense of humor. Joe Biden shows he has one (yes, this is a campaign ad).

No comments:

Post a Comment