05-18-2020, 03:54 PM
(05-18-2020, 11:38 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(05-18-2020, 10:12 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:(05-18-2020, 04:30 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: The facts on the ground say the climate is warmer in the south than in New York. If climate was the driving factor right now, New York would not be having fewer cases, the southern states more.
Wikipedia data shows that New York had 1889 new cases and 141 new deaths on the most recent day for which they had figures, May 16. By comparison, Texas had 785 new cases and 31 new deaths. Florida had 1189 new cases and 16 new deaths. The idea that New York has "fewer cases" is delusional.
I don't blame lying for your falsehood, though. It's clearly just cluelessness.
The CNN report has the northeast curves going down, the whole south going up. Clearly isolation policies are dominant over climate. Yes, the northeast got hit first. Their absolute values are higher. They peaked, at least for the first wave.
I don't interpret your misreading the numbers as deliberate lying, just cluelessness. We'll see if the models are correct, that we will have many more infections in a few weeks, followed by more deaths.
The difference between summer and winter is far sharper in the northern US than in the South (the West Coast excepted)... people adopted stronger countermeasures Up North and Out West than in the South. There were exceptions that generally relate to R-dominated politics, which means that Iowa and Nebraska have been fitting the bad patterns of Southern states. The Northeastern quadrant and the Far West got hit earlier and harder but responded faster. It is often a question of who the Governor is, which explains why South Dakota is in far worse shape than is Kentucky.
COVID-19 is apparently not a quick-kill, so deaths lag new cases by a considerable time.
No reasonable person expects a higher and hotter sun to kill off the plague by itself. As with AIDS (which infects people with very different means of transmission), people are changing their ways for a duration if they have any wisdom. Note well that a cluster of infected people in Wisconsin connects closely to an anti-shutdown rally. Did you notice that there are no counter-protesters?
It may be that a state like Massachusetts can open earlier and safer than can Georgia. If there is any lasting effect it will be that populist disdain for scientific evidence will be less common.
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.