Quote from: jhkimThese 50,000 deaths are over 10 days -- during a period when most of the world is taking extraordinary measures to control the disease. I think there's good reason to think that if we hadn't had social distancing, then there would be even more deaths, and the economy would be disrupted anyway because of the disease spreading wildly and a much higher death rate.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1126537Thing is we don't know. One example I heard was that we have extreme social distancing....except at a generally regular basis when people are getting food....Which would make the whole thing rather redundant.

It's important to not fall into the pattern of 'Well we know its working because the bad thing didn't happen', otherwise you can attribute any sort of scam as working. Correlation =/= causation.

But as I said, il be the first to say I don't know.

We have a lot of data on different countries/states that implemented social distancing at different times in the infection curve. For example, the virus spread and death toll has been very different in South Korea, Italy, Spain, California, and New York. Those differences are being studied hard by experts in infectious disease, but just from a layman's point of view, it seems like California's early social distancing is having better results than New York's later distancing. Right now, I don't know of anyone in New York who is thinking "Oh, damn. I'm glad we're not like California." (Note: I grew up in New York and my parents are there, but have been living in California since 1998. So I have a bunch of connections in both of those. I am quite concerned for my parents in New York especially.)

I believe there are scams. I avoid social media and television news especially for solid information. However, I think scientific and health organizations like the CDC are reasonably reliable, at least far more reliable than their general opposition like anti-vaccination organizations or Youtubers and similar.

Quote from: jhkim;1126556We have a lot of data

We have allot of estimate data on information thats really hard to track, with billions of other factors that we won't even start guessing at until years later. For instance California is allot less population dense then New York (The center of the world economically). And Japan is a tiny island with much stronger border control and a culture that very much shuns contact.

I just hear 'Experts think' so much every minute of every day. Experts think one thing one day and another another. Because there are 1,000 experts and each has a different spin.
What counts as an expert really only depends on public opinion.

Im just DONE trusting 'Expert Data'. Again not saying that I know or don't know whats helping. But at a time like this when there is pressure to say things to make you sound important (more than usual) , I just don't trust 'Experts'.

You don't have to be a scammer or a bad man. You can make an informed decision based off improper information.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1124392...
2. There are a lot of idiots in the world that will do all kinds of stupid stuff, that even common sense should tell them not to.  There are also a subset of them, many of them employed in the media, that would sell their grandmother to a Wuhan brothel to get Trump.  Anyone that can't see that is a fool.  ...  That means that for the average person in the public, getting useful information is more difficult than it should be.  This will contribute to the chaos of the moment.

Truth.

Quote from: From a Blog I Follow:...
The Fake News has been attempting to retroactively establish a fake narrative about President Trump's robust response to Corona-chan:

Full article: https://theothermccain.com/2020/04/10/jan-30-we-still-believe-the-immediate-risk-to-the-american-public-is-low/

Highlight Summary:

One of the repeated lies of the anti-Trump media is that the president failed to do what was necessary to prevent the spread of this disease. We are told, by Democrats and the media, that President Trump "wasted" six weeks during which he should have been . . . Well, doing something more than what he did, which was actually quite a lot.

On Jan. 29, Trump announced the formation of his Coronavirus Task Force, headed by HHS Secretary Alex Azar, and including the CDC director Dr. Redfield, who retired from the Army medical service with the rank of colonel, and whose medical specialty is viruses. On Jan. 31, Trump announced a ban on travel from China, which was controversial at the time. The same day Trump announced the ban, Joe Biden, campaigning in Iowa, accused the president of "hysterical xenophobia," saying Trump was leading with "fearmongering . . . instead of science."

The claim that Trump is "anti-science" has become part of the media's narrative about the COVID-19 outbreak. Supposedly, a bias against science explains why the president didn't do whatever it was that his critics, with the benefit of hindsight, say he should have done. What he actually did, however, was entirely in keeping with what the medical experts would have advised, given the circumstances. With only six known coronavirus cases in the U.S., five of them were people who had just returned from Wuhan, and the sixth was a household member of one of these travelers. So the first thing to do, obviously, was stop the arrival of more infected people from China, where the pandemic began and at the time had just been recognized as a "global emergency" by the WHO.

OK, so what happened next? As of Feb. 26 -- nearly a month after Trump had created the coronavirus task force -- there were still only 15 known cases of the disease in the United States. It was on Feb. 28 that Case No. 16 was identified in Santa Clara County, California:

At that point -- where the 16th case had just been identified -- there was not a single known COVID-19 case in New York or New Jersey. The only known case on the East Coast up to that point, was a man who had recently arrived in Boston from Wuhan, China, in late January. At that time, Boston Public Health Commission director Rita Nieves said, "The risk to the general public remains low." And this continued to be the case throughout February, so that if you want to cherry-pick quotes by President Trump during that time saying that he believed we had the problem under control, and that the Wuhan coronavirus posed no serious risk to Americans, so what? This was the consensus of the medical community at the time.
...

Quote from: From a Blog I Follow:...
Let's not forget that when Trump declared the China travel ban nearly a month before the medical community decided that the virus posed a serious risk to Americans, he was castigated for doing this by the very same people who are criticizing him for not having done enough now..

Virtually every country got this wrong because China was, and still is, lying out of it's ass about their real numbers.

Quote from: Jaeger;1126581Virtually every country got this wrong because China was, and still is, lying out of it's ass about their real numbers.

While this is true for more or less everyone, all of you who weren't Italy also had our warnings and our data. But you chose to ignore them...

Quote from: Spinachcat;1126465Dr. Birx even admitted the death toll is bullshit. She said "If Someone Dies With COVID-19 We Are Counting That As A COVID-19 Death". What a joke!

100,000 dead worldwide! Oh noes! Gotta shut down the world!!!

In October 2019, the Journal of Global Health told us a fun fact. The average annual worldwide death toll from the flu is 389,000 which makes CoronaChan a lame media SHAMdemic.  
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6815659/

Oh man, you look so ridiculous right now. Denial is not a pretty outfit for you, my pirate friend.

But again, we all cope differently. You do you.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1126518You realize that the very post you quoted mentions the fact that they're counting every single death of people that happened to have the virus as having died because of it regardless of their actual cause of death, making the death estimates fundamentally suspect and flawed?

They're not wrecking the world economy just to make Trump look bad. They're doing it because people are dumb panicky animals who are easily duped and mislead, and have been misinformed with contradictory information by the media since day one. And with the advent of the internet and 24/7 "news" media people are oversaturated and bombarded with misinformation all the time to the point of generating mass panic.

People are also very dumb in general and politicians are no exception. I mean Democrats were willing to agitate a nuclear power (Russia) over loosing an election, you think politicians care about what they wreck when the public and future generations are the ones who're gonna have foot the bill? Fucking things up and making the public pay for it is what the political class does best.

Ah, the cry of the conspiracy theorist since the days of yore. That they are just smarter than everyone else. That everyone else is sheep and only they have seen The Truth!

So sad. So, so sad. Going down the rabbit hole which, at best looks silly, and at worst is the heart of pretty much every mass atrocity ever.

China's certainly guilty of suppressing information, and the WHO is complicit in supporting their narrative. But what did you expect? It's a totalitarian government, and an international body composed of many totalitarian states. There is exactly zero reason to suppose either would behave in a beneficent and transparent manner, instead of covering their ass and bowing to political pressure. But while China did conceal important data, the spread of information about the severity of the disease was only delayed for a bit. The world, including Italy, still had enough time to react.

Yet everyone except Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and belatedly China reacted poorly. That's not China's fault. It's because the rest of the world had no experience with this kind of thing, so there was no public or official will for draconian measures, very early on. And since diseases spread at an exponential pace, that's exactly when an overwhelming response is needed. The "wait and see" attitude doesn't work, because by the time it feels like a real threat, it's far too late for containment. This was and is a learning experience both for governments and the populace at large.

So if you blame any of the governments who failed at containment, you have to blame them all. And that's ridiculous, because it requires assuming that governments can and will react with perfect wisdom and paternalistic foresight, even against the wishes of the people they supposedly represent. It's really bizarre how many people seem to implicitly accept that.

Quote from: Mistwell;1126606Ah, the cry of the conspiracy theorist since the days of yore. That they are just smarter than everyone else. That everyone else is sheep and only they have seen The Truth!

So sad. So, so sad. Going down the rabbit hole which, at best looks silly, and at worst is the heart of pretty much every mass atrocity ever.

Ah, the cry of the willful sheep--lots of pointed jabs, but no actual argument.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1126621Ah, the cry of the willful sheep--lots of pointed jabs, but no actual argument.

The argument is your position reflects 100% the conspiracy theory pattern. It lacks any evidence, it adapts around any evidence presented, it depends on elements which cannot be disproven with evidence, it twists all arguments to be spun to your benefit, etc..

It's the same strategy used in history to, for example, dehumanize Jews. It's a very dependable, predictable strategy. And it deserves to be called out every time it's seen. Because it's shitty unethical and reckless behavior.

Quote from: Luca;1126591While this is true for more or less everyone, all of you who weren't Italy also had our warnings and our data. But you chose to ignore them...

Actually, New York, New jersey, and Detroit followed a similar philosophy to some regions in Italy early on:
https://in.news.yahoo.com/italy-launched-hug-chinese-campaign-065339340.html

Luckily, the rest of my country listened more to Trump and was a bit more proactive and prudent.

Nobody got it perfect.

Quote from: Pat;1126609So if you blame any of the governments who failed at containment, you have to blame them all. And that's ridiculous, because it requires assuming that governments can and will react with perfect wisdom and paternalistic foresight, even against the wishes of the people they supposedly represent. It's really bizarre how many people seem to implicitly accept that.

I don't completely agree with this. Yes, the situation is unprecedented, but it had been foreseen previously. Maybe those who reacted so well started with previous experience due to the SARS outbreak of a few years ago, but the thing is: they were far better prepared.

Had western countries prepared themselves by building strategic stockpiles of face masks to distribute to the population, proper ways of tracking contacts (like phone apps who can anonymously track proximity by numeric IDs and "deanonimize" once it is found you have had close contact with an infected by warning you and the government), places to send people for mandatory quarantine (with all incurred expenses paid by the government) etc., the spread could have been contained much better and without needing such draconian measures as to destroy the country's economy. Of course, not having done that beforehand, once the first person was infected, it was already too late and countrywide lockdown became the only realistic response.

Hopefully at least *some* of the countries will learn from this. I'm not holding my breath for mine, given the pathetic state of our politics, but we'll see.

Quote from: Luca;1126632I don't completely agree with this. Yes, the situation is unprecedented, but it had been foreseen previously. Maybe those who reacted so well started with previous experience due to the SARS outbreak of a few years ago, but the thing is: they were far better prepared.

Had western countries prepared themselves by building strategic stockpiles of face masks to distribute to the population, proper ways of tracking contacts (like phone apps who can anonymously track proximity by numeric IDs and "deanonimize" once it is found you have had close contact with an infected by warning you and the government), places to send people for mandatory quarantine (with all incurred expenses paid by the government) etc., the spread could have been contained much better and without needing such draconian measures as to destroy the country's economy. Of course, not having done that beforehand, once the first person was infected, it was already too late and countrywide lockdown became the only realistic response.

Hopefully at least *some* of the countries will learn from this. I'm not holding my breath for mine, given the pathetic state of our politics, but we'll see.

Sure, it had been foreseen. But there's a difference between having a few experts working on plans and models, and the occasionally national drill; and the political and public will for a concerted response. Which was entirely lacking.

And your solutions sound horrific. Perpetual government tracking of its citizens, having to carry digital papers at all times, and concentration camps is about 3 Orwells beyond a dystopian nightmare. Not to mention, it's completely unnecessary.

What if a conspiracy theory is later proven true?  There are lots of things that were conspiracy theories, and the curtain came back and....turns out they were true, for example the claims the NSA is spying on everyone..sounded nuts...but..

Quote from: Mistwell;1126623The argument is your position reflects 100% the conspiracy theory pattern. It lacks any evidence, it adapts around any evidence presented, it depends on elements which cannot be disproven with evidence, it twists all arguments to be spun to your benefit, etc..

It's the same strategy used in history to, for example, dehumanize Jews. It's a very dependable, predictable strategy. And it deserves to be called out every time it's seen. Because it's shitty unethical and reckless behavior.

You're still not addressing or refuting a single actual thing I said, but are instead dismissing it as "conspiracy theories" while accusing me of engaging in rhetoric comparable to anti-Semitic propaganda without basis. You're not "calling out shitty unethical and reckless behavior" you're just declaring it to be so from the comfort of your high horse without so much as pointing to a single specific example of it.

Meanwhile most of the opinions I had the audacity to "recklessly" and "unethically" express--apparently in a manner reminiscent of "dehumanizing the Jews" (a people mentioned nowhere in my post)--are actually based on facts. The number of deaths does include anyone who has been infected regardless of actual cause of death, which is a non-controversial statement that has been admitted by the authorities. That fact does put the actual death toll in question. The media has misinformed the public with inaccurate and contradictory information since day one--first downplaying the virus and calling anyone who took it seriously a conspiracy nut then ramming up the panic with questionable figures that include anyone who might have been infected regardless of how they died. None of these are controversial statements, but apparently I'm calling for the death of the Jews.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1126641The number of deaths does include anyone who has been infected regardless of actual cause of death, which is a non-controversial statement that has been admitted by the authorities.

Not true.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/italys-coronavirus-death-toll-is-far-higher-than-reported-11585767179