09-12-2020, 06:48 PM
(09-12-2020, 04:43 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(09-04-2020, 08:27 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: That is the point. Not only is testing tricky... so are logistics. Trump seems to believe that one can operate in "try something and see if it works". Such ranges from unconscionable to impossible. Tests of random cures to determine what works are more likely to result in pointless injury and death than in quick studies. I would guess that the attention is on antibodies. The analogy is to influenza.
To be sure, people in desperate condition, as with terminal cancer, might be willing to endure experimental therapies that have some chance of killing them outright... but unlike experimental treatments, vaccines are used (optimally) upon healthy people who intend to not get the disease.
It is now one day less than two months before the 2020 election, and at this point Donald Trump basically says "Trust me!" about a subject about which he knows nothing.
Donald Trump is doing so badly that it is entirely possible that President Biden will be obliged to call Congress and the Senate to start over with a more rigid lockdown than the one that we had last time. Maybe it will be easier in the winter, when there are far fewer places that people want to go. Trump wasted the heroic efforts that many state governments, Big Business, and huge chunks of the American people made in the spring of 2020. This time it will be harsher only to the extent that states that responded ineffectively to COVID-19 (like Iowa) will make states that responded properly (like Minnesota) to get it right this time.
I still have two words to describe the President's response to COVID-19:
NEGLIGENT HOMICIDE
Dude, if NEGLIGENT HOMICIDE applied, you'd already be dead and I wouldn't be responding to your nonsense right now. Something else that you've ignored, the states of New York and New Jersey responded the most ineffectively so far and are still largely shutdown right now. California is now in the same boat as them. Michigan and Illinois haven't done all that greater either. Minnesota has listened to Trump and Minnesota has done much better than most blue states so far.
I have done a good job shielding myself from COVID-19, have I not? I was early to start wearing a mask, and I use it even when I go to a drive-up window. Because of a mask I can go to the grocery store, the bank, the library, book stores, gas stations, a car-repair place, and even some restaurants (for take-out, of course). It also helps that I live in a rural area that got hit rather late, as opposed to Detroit -- which got hit early and hard.
Michigan has done well by US standards in suppressing COVID-19 after the initial outbreak. It had the fourth-highest number of total deaths, and that has dropped to nine. We are now doing something right. Maybe not enough ideally, but we didn't have anything going on that could act as super-spreader events... like the big motorcyclist 'convention' in Sturgis, South Dakota.
At this point, people getting COVID-19 are often getting it through some act of extreme stupidity, and not by, for example, vulnerability due to their work.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.