OceanStWx

Western Maine mountains should get crushed based on the low development and LLJ.

Atoll living is pretty nice. I think I could make a go of it with reef fish and coconuts no Tikehau right now.

Hey @ORH_wxman, I could think of worse places to be stuck. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/style/coronavirus-honeymoon-stranded.html If you read to the end you hear that they found out today that RSA will subsidize the part of the trip where they got stuck, so at least the extra nights in the overwater bungalow won't bankrupt them.

If you aren't inclined to believe what you read in a newspaper, just watch a YouTube video about COVID and 5G. That's where you get your real info.

We can hope, but Italy also dropped a couple days before spiking to near 1,000 daily deaths.

I still haven't seen a good answer as to why we struck out developing our own test when there were good tests already out there around the world. That definitely led to at least a couple week delay. When you're doubling every 2-3 days that's not good.

There is a complaint out there that states like CA or NY would have too much political power without an Electoral College, well this is a case where they are even more powerful when it comes to bidding on medical supplies. If CA wants to outbid OK for ventilators, it will. I don't think folks in OKC are going to love that very much.

I'd exercise caution with the numbers there, as they've shown dips on Sunday reporting before only to bounce back on Monday.

My biggest issue with what I've seen so far is that every move is reactive (usually to bad press). They are treating it like a PR problem, when it's a public health and economic problem. A couple days in a row of the DOW going up isn't going to solve the problem. The stay at home orders on a national level are great, but we have to do something with the time. So far that seems to be making money for middle men ferrying PPE and increasing the profit margins of private testing companies. We could use the DPA to pay fair price for the 5 min tests, but instead we're going to allow states to bid against each other for them.

The US in general is terrible at preparedness. That is somewhat a function of the population unwilling to elect leaders that prioritize those things. I keep hearing how the federal government is a back up for the states. Well states are failing right now, so I'm still curious as to when the federal back up will arrive. It seems despite pleas from states that need help, the federal government waited until the press was bad before trying to move supplies around. Sometimes 50 states pulling in different directions is not efficient, and having a coordinated response is helpful.

I thought the time for blame was over and we need to move forward?

Honestly we should've just shut it all down for a few weeks, allowed gov't/private sector ramp up testing capacity while the spread slowed down, then aggressively test/trace/isolate as measures were relaxed. The patchwork nature and half measures have allowed us to get to where we are right now, and testing capacity still hasn't caught up to it. So as Steve says, we're still just mitigating not containing.

I think some of the opinion writers have an overly rosy picture of how things recover if we just relax social distancing measures. I see a lot of assumption that we'll just snap back, but reality is probably far from that. We may only be willing to put up with another couple months of this, but I think it's wrong to think the choices are between keeping people healthy or keeping the economy healthy. The reality is that relaxing distancing probably leads to more illness/death and an economy that doesn't snap back quickly. You can't really just have older people quarantine themselves and send younger/healthy people back to work and have a fully functioning economy for one. But relaxation will lead to young people getting sick in droves too, and it's not like sick people are going to work and participating in the economy.

It's reasonable to think that many of the flu-like illness was in fact COVID-19. But again, we knew in that intervening time that we needed to ramp up testing. I think we're still reacting to news about cases rather than getting ahead of them, and until we do get ahead of it we're not going to see the curve bend in any meaningful way.

From 1/27: "But while on the one hand, I'm saying don't worry, and don't be afraid, on the other hand, we, the health officials are taking this very seriously because this potentially can turn into an outbreak that gets beyond China and out of control. I hope it doesn't."