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Upstate NY Banter and General Discussion..


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So it’s essentially come to this: President Trump is treating each of our 50 states as individual contestants on “The Apprentice” — pitting them against one another for scarce resources, daring them to duke it out — rather than mobilizing a unified national response to a pandemic.

If that’s the case, this is the episode where New York loses. The coronavirus is whipping through the state, especially New York City, at a terrifying rate. We need personnel, ventilators and personal protective equipment, stat.

But Trump’s response has been the same as President Gerald Ford’s in 1975, when our city, faltering on the brink of insolvency, begged Washington for help and was brutally rebuffed, a moment forever enshrined in The Daily News’s headline “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”

Now Trump is telling us the same. Literally

 

Untold thousands will likely die absent federal intervention. And it needs to happen this instant — not just for the good of the city, but for the nation. The president needs to set a precedent in his hometown.

 

On Tuesday morning, Gov. Andrew Cuomo opened his daily coronavirus briefing on a far more somber note than usual, noting that the number of cases was climbing at a faster rate than even the experts had predicted, doubling roughly every three days. “The apex is higher than we thought and the apex is sooner than we thought,” he said. “That is a bad combination of facts.”

What it means, practically speaking: Our hospitals will soon be overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients. The governor has already said that the state is 30,000 ventilators short. The only way to acquire the volume we need — delivered at the speed we need — is through federal intervention, which means sending us the bulk of the ventilators from the strategic national stockpile, which has roughly 20,000, and deploying the Defense Production Act to force private manufacturers to make more.

But that’s not what the president is doing. He refuses to use the Defense Production Act, fearing it’ll put an undue burden on business, and he’s keeping his federal stash under tight lock and key. On Tuesday morning, Cuomo confirmed that FEMA would be sending the state only 400 ventilators. (“What are we going to do with 400 ventilators when we need 30,000?” he asked.) Vice President Mike Pence later said he’d send New York 4,000 from the stockpile — a fine start, but nowhere near what New York needs.

 

What is the president waiting for, and why is he hoarding — or let’s be charitable and say husbanding — his resources? Must the death toll in New York prove so calamitous he needs no further proof? Is he trying to make an example of his former home?

“I will take personal responsibility for transporting the 20,000 ventilators anywhere in this country that they want, once we are past our apex,” Cuomo said. “But don’t leave them sitting in a stockpile, and say, ‘Well, we’re going to wait and see how we allocate them across the country.’ That’s not how this works.”

It would be one thing if other states were in the same dire position as New York. But they aren’t. We have 10 times the number of cases as Washington and eight times that of California. New Yorkers are now locked in place, waiting for the wave to come. As of Tuesday night, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, recommends that New Yorkers self-quarantine if they leave the state. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is ordering anyone flying in from New York to self-quarantine for 14 days upon landing.

I guess Trump likes the numbers where they are. I have news for him: They won’t stay that way. The idea that New York is an exception rather than a harbinger is madness.

The rest of the country may regard New York as a black hole of need. But in fact the opposite has always been true; we’re forever sweeping more into the federal till than we receive in services. In 2018, according to the state comptroller’s office, we gave $26.6 billion more to Washington than we got back, ranking us dead last for federal benefits.

Now, we finally have a native New Yorker in the White House to do something about this discrepancy. Instead, he’s the worst offender, and this time the consequences will be lethal.

Part of me can’t help but wonder if Trump is just playing to his base, which views cities with suspicion, perhaps New York above all. We are multiculturalism personified — home of the United Nations, a place where 637 languages and dialects are spoken. A purée while the rest of the nation is vegetable soup, as Spalding Gray once lovingly said.

Never mind that Trump is himself a creature of New York, just a different dimension of New York. Tabloid New York, real estate New York and (above all, and most ironically) global New York, which made possible his worldwide hotels, his construction projects made of Chinese steel, his loans from Deutsche Bank. It’s a New York he now disavows. A New York he now blames.

But it was New York that made him a reality television star. And what reality television prizes more than anything, we’ve learned, is a Darwinian frame of mind. The contestants aren’t there to make friends. They’re there to destroy each other. They’re there to win. Only the best win.

But this is not a game. Trump has no clue how to marshal the forces of federal government, which he stripped down to the studs. He has no unifying instincts at all. New York will be gasping for breath, and the other states will soon follow. Unless he takes action, now.

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Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear announced Tuesday 39 new coronavirus cases in the state, including one young adult who attended a "coronavirus party," apparently held to flout social distancing guidelines.

"This is one that makes me mad, and it should make you mad," Beshear said of the case that occurred after the person attended a party of people in their 20s, who health officials say are as a group less vulnerable to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

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28 minutes ago, wolfie09 said:

1470654053_killgrandma.jpg.64b6f2955cfad

Sorry not sorry kill Grandma. Not because some asshole becomes slightly less rich but because far more people will die if the world remains shutdown. Food doesn’t just magically appear on plates. Other countries economies have failed catastrophically in our lifetimes, ours is no different. 

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This is disgusting...getting millions of dollars for the performing arts as part of the stimulus package?

 

The appropriations text, released Wednesday along with the draft bill itself, includes $25 million in funding for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. That is down from the $35 million that was included in the recent Democratic-proposed House legislation.

The Senate bill also provides $75 million to each the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. That is down from the $300 million for each that was in the House stimulus bill.

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Updated county numbers. 

LAST UPDATE: MARCH 25, 2020 | 1:46PM
Albany 152
Allegany 2
Broome 11
Cayuga 2
Chautauqua 1
Chemung 1
Chenango 3
Clinton 10
Columbia 12
Cortland 2
Delaware 5
Dutchess 153
Erie 122
Essex 4
Franklin 1
Fulton 1
Genesee 2
Greene 4
Hamilton 2
Herkimer 5
Jefferson 2
Livingston 3
Madison 7
Monroe 118
Montgomery 4
Nassau 3,285
Niagara 12
New York City 17,856
Oneida 9
Onondaga 65
Ontario 9
Orange 638
Oswego 2
Otsego 2
Putnam 84
Rensselaer 31
Rockland 968
Saratoga 64
Schenectady 55
Schoharie 2
St. Lawrence 1
Steuben 8
Suffolk 2,260
Sullivan 39
Tioga 1
Tompkins 16
Ulster 65
Warren 2
Washington 4
Wayne 7
Westchester 4,691
Wyoming 4
Total Number of Positive Cases 30,811
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13 minutes ago, BuffaloWeather said:

Mortality up to 4.53%

Again though this is of tested cases which is going to skew the numbers a lot. Right now the only people getting tested at least locally are the ones with the most severe symptoms or those who have been exposed to someone with an already positive test which is very limited since there were several days that Erie County had no reagents to preform test so basically you need to either be extremely ill or have come in direct contact with the 122 in Erie county that already tested positives and show symptoms to even get tested. I know numerous people who have been in DIRECT CONTACT with someone testing positive and are now showing symptoms but because they are young they are being told they will not receive any testing and to just monitor their symptoms at home. This doesn’t even include the thousands of not hundreds or thousands that likely have the virus and are asymptomatic and will never be counted since they don’t know they have it (still dangerous, if not more dangerous to the public since they can still spread it). This is a serious serious illness and I am taking every precaution I can to protect my family but I know that these death rates are definitely skewed with lack of/testing availability.

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1 hour ago, Luke_Mages said:

This is disgusting...getting millions of dollars for the performing arts as part of the stimulus package?

 

The appropriations text, released Wednesday along with the draft bill itself, includes $25 million in funding for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. That is down from the $35 million that was included in the recent Democratic-proposed House legislation.

The Senate bill also provides $75 million to each the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. That is down from the $300 million for each that was in the House stimulus bill.

Let's say they give 200 million dollars to the performing arts, which is something that has the potential to actually help normal Americans, that accounts for less than .1% of the 2 TRILLION dollar bailout but somehow you are fine with $500 BILLION (25%!!) for corporate bailouts even though these companies just got a massive tax cut and have been buying back stock like crazy.  

Either you are really bad at math or you are you awful human, because that is decimal dust in the grand scheme of it all.  I'm starting to think its the latter...

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25 minutes ago, WesterlyWx said:

Again though this is of tested cases which is going to skew the numbers a lot. Right now the only people getting tested at least locally are the ones with the most severe symptoms or those who have been exposed to someone with an already positive test which is very limited since there were several days that Erie County had no reagents to preform test so basically you need to either be extremely ill or have come in direct contact with the 122 in Erie county that already tested positives and show symptoms to even get tested. I know numerous people who have been in DIRECT CONTACT with someone testing positive and are now showing symptoms but because they are young they are being told they will not receive any testing and to just monitor their symptoms at home. This doesn’t even include the thousands of not hundreds or thousands that likely have the virus and are asymptomatic and will never be counted since they don’t know they have it (still dangerous, if not more dangerous to the public since they can still spread it). This is a serious serious illness and I am taking every precaution I can to protect my family but I know that these death rates are definitely skewed with lack of/testing availability.

I think the important take away is that if you do catch this and end up quite sick, you have a 4-10% chance of dying, that's pretty terrifying, in other words, the death rate for moderately to severely sick people is 4%

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