Yeah because grocery stores aren’t needed in everyday life. It’s not like they provide food for 99.999% of the populace. Don’t be deliberately obtuse.
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Yeah because grocery stores aren’t needed in everyday life. It’s not like they provide food for 99.999% of the populace. Don’t be deliberately obtuse.
It’s not obtuse. Just like restaurant food, groceries can be delivered, and or pre packaged for quick pickup. With those facts, what differentiates it from restaurant gatherings?
Why don’t you try ordering some groceries right now? Be sure to let us all know how that works out.
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Yeah, I don’t think grocery stores have the logistical capacity to shop for and deliver or ship for every person in America. They’d have to hire hundreds of thousands of people. Can you imagine the chaos?
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Walmart is looking for 120K employees right now.
This New Yorker piece is the most comprehensive I’ve seen on the regulatory process surrounding the early COVID-19 testing.
As for the delay in scaling up covid -19 testing capacity during those crucial weeks in February, Jerome told me that the underlying problem had far less to do with the faulty tests produced by the C.D.C. than it did with a system that could not contemplate, let alone manage, the possibility that the C.D.C. might end up producing faulty tests. The F.D.A.’s exclusive authorization to the C.D.C. to conduct covid -19 tests ended up creating “what you’d think of as an agriculture monoculture. If something went wrong, it was going to shut everything down, and that’s what happened.” Jerome said that his lab has taken its own steps to mitigate this problem. “We’ve built three completely independent testing pathways in our laboratory, so that if there’s a shortage of a reagent or a bit of plastic, we have other ways to do the testing.”
Sharfstein, too, thinks that it’s fair to criticize the federal government for not recognizing that its pandemic plans had a single point of failure. The C.D.C. quickly developed a working test, and it was understandable, at some level, that people at the Centers thought that fixing the faulty reagents for the public-health labs would be faster than shifting to an entirely different protocol. Nevertheless, Sharfstein said, “Why are we relying only on the C.D.C.? What the F.D.A. could have done, and eventually did do, is say, ‘You can use other approaches.’ ” Even so, he said, “I don’t think it’s quite fair to totally blame the F.D.A. for this. The F.D.A. can design an approach to support the public-health strategy, but someone has to tell F.D.A. the public-health goal.” The delay in clearly establishing those goals, he said, shows why the decision to shut down the N.S.C. directorate was so consequential. “People talk about, like, why does it matter that they closed the White House office on pandemic preparedness? This is one reason.”
A perfect storm.
The Utah company that, once they have the reagent, can produce 50,000 tests a day that provide results in 90 minutes, was held up in red tape.
They were certified by the EU and sending tests there, but it took a long time for the US to clear them to supply US labs.
Any of us who works in or with government knows how much red tape gets in the way. Even in an emergency.
This is from a Facebook post by a physician friend of mine who is an emergency room doc. He’s politically liberal but still occasionally right about some things. 
Can we step back for a reality check for a moment?
If we accept all of the worst assumptions about COVID, it will kill 0.5 to 1% of us. That is an enormous number, no doubt, and would be an unimaginable tragedy.
But at the same time, that also means that you have a 99+% chance of coming out of this. Those are really good odds, odds that I suspect that the vast majority of humans throughout history, and even in many present day countries, would jump at accepting. We’re enormously blessed.
But to continue, take a look at the mortality rate of life in the US and world in 2019. Death rate, crude (per 1,000 people) | Data
Seriously, go through the table for a bit. These are per 1000 people, so divide by 10. For the US, it was 0.9%, meaning that regular life in 2019 posed roughly the same risk of dying to you as COVID does now. For some countries, it was much higher. Sure, COVID is partially additive (not completely–many people who will die from it were going to die anyway). But the fact is, you’ve done this, I’ve done this, we’ve all done this, or at least something very similar. (And some of us have silently and bravely faced much worse odds.)And you did it without becoming a different person. I’m alarmed at some of what I’m hearing about out there. I’m alarmed at the ugly impulses I’ve seen come up in myself too. Fear certainly brings out the worst in us, and this unnatural, and hopefully temporary, state of isolation isn’t helping. Acknowledge the fear–it’s understandable and ok–but then let’s all respond with our best selves, the ones that reach out–with appropriate social distancing :)–and look for ways to give and not take. Let’s all be better. This will pass.
(Again, and I hate that I have to say this–this is not meant to dismiss the threat or take lightly any quarantine measures.)
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And this is more or less what I’ve been saying from the beginning. Understanding that 7,500 die in the US alone every day. And understanding that the vast vast majority of Covid deaths are in elderly people who have underlying medical conditions. How can be necessary to hurt so many people so badly? I just got an email that one Pennsylvania just ordered all non-essential businesses to close, which includes not just retail businesses. This is hurting so many average working people.
I seriously doubt you could convince me that the overwhelming of our medical system with elderly already sick people who are made sicker by this virus couldn’t have been met with a very strong response with just a fraction of the resources that we are and will be expending in an effort to prop up an economy that we’ve completely frozen.
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Umm you can still social distance in the grocery store. Pretty easy to stay 6 ft away from others in the store. Did it just fine on Monday night when I got the last of what I need for staying home.
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Is CorVid19 now called Covid19?
It’s not just the elderly that are overwhelming the hospitals. Lots of younger and middle aged people require hospitalization.
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-03-19/nearly-40-37-of-hospitalizations-in-us-covid-19-cases-involve-adults-under-55
My wife and I were talking about this last night. Its a good point. The numbers look scary and they are. The sudden surge in displacement just from this that will be 2019 is uncomfortable. Yes, other events or issues could take lives at any time.
In the scenarios I ran the other day, I use mortality rates of 0.7% and 1.4%. I continue to believe those values and not higher values will be realized. But as he pointed out, “that is an enormous number.”
I guess this is encouraging — an effort by a private company to create a test. I did a little quick Google searching and can’t find much about this company. At $135 per test, this will be expensive for many people. If it’s legitimate, the government should pay for it.
Yeah, private industry! The other test, that costs $1,150 I think I read.
I read the underlying report and it really seems like news media is stretching their conclusions by selecting the right age cutoff and ignoring underlying health issues in order to influence younger people to care more.
For the Mormons on the board, what happens to how they distribute the Sacrament?
Apparently they used to drink out of one cup and pass it along. That is until the president, Joseph F Smith got the flu in the pandemic 100 years ago and died from it. I understand they think he got sick from the sacrament cup so that is when they changed to the individual cups.
So, I’ve always thought it was awfully unhygienic the way the way the kids touched the bread and water cups. I would see toddlers spill the cups they just drank out of into unused cups as they put theirs away.
Hopefully they will come up with a cleaner solution because it’s really gross as it is now.
NYT Opinion: The Best Case Outcome for Coronavirus and the Worst.
Will we endure 2.2 million deaths? Or will we manage to turn things around?
“The best case is that the virus mutates and actually dies out,” said Dr. Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who as a young doctor was part of the fight to eradicate smallpox. Brilliant was a consultant for the movie “Contagion,” in which a virus evolved to become more deadly, but that’s the exception. “Only in movies do viruses seem to become worse,” he explained.
Two other lethal coronaviruses, SARS and MERS, both petered out, and that is possible here. “My hope is that Covid-19 will not survive,” said Dr. Charles G. Prober, a professor at Stanford Medical School.
“Singapore is a best-case scenario,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He said that there was some possibility that with social distancing and limits on gatherings, the United States could knock down the numbers of infections and begin to adopt Singapore-style strategies to reduce new infections.
“The most important lesson is that the virus can be contained if people are responsible and adhere to certain simple principles,” said Dr. Christopher Willis, a physician in Singapore. “Stay calm. For most people it’s like the common cold.”
Emphasis added.
Taxes are being delayed.