Liberty

Aaand I'm out. Finally.

“ Dr. Fauci now up and emphasizing again that anyone whose been in New York (last 14 days?) must self-isolate. Says "We understand that people want to get out of New York right now" but... they should self-isolate.”

Does this sound like someone worried about his citizens' lives, or someone worried about how much flak he's getting and about deflecting blame? Someone on Twitter wrote about this: "Now our governors know how President Zelensky felt."

Yeah, this is what Peter Attia has been saying lately. This shouldn't be looked at by country, but by city/area. Parts of Italy have very low mortality, but Milan is like 40x Sicily per capita or something like that.

Post on viral load, and why getting infected with a higher viral load is a problem:

It took from January to March 5 to get to 100k cases. It took from March 5th to March 24th to get 400k. ^to test That was implied. Nobody knows the real number of infected, and various multipliers I've seen range from 10 to 50x.

This isn't politics. This is a public health issue, and not a theoretical one. The person in charge is incompetent to deal with it. If you want to pretend this is politics, fine, but it isn't. I don't care he's right or left, blue or red, purple or orange. if he was acting rationally and competently in the face of the COVID19 threat, I'd applaud, but he's not, so I'm explaining why I think that is. Now stay civil or get out. LOL Let me know if you think this political: 1. Hillary's a narcissistic personality disorder and likely a sociopath. 2. Biden's not intellectually capable. They were/are the Trump alternative. Can we stick with criticizing the strategy and skip questioning the motivation? Why are you wasting everyone's time trying to derail this thread with unrelated things? By understanding how someone thinks and what motivates them, you can make predictions about what decisions they will make. Trump is currently the president. It's very important to understand how he thinks in this life or death situation with huge economic and institutional impacts on the US and the world. Those who pretend that he's a normal person have been wrong about him at every turn exactly because they don't realize how he thinks and what motivates him. Trying to pretend that others are just like Trump is bonkers on its face, especially others that we've seen hold office and we know what they're like (like them or not, that's fine, but they're nothing like Trump).

And the rest of the country has the ventilators they need... Bill Barr claims he will aggressively prosecute 'hoarding'. Will he order hospitals with ventilators to share in order to save lives in NYC? Yeah, but who's going to send their ventilators over and then not have enough later on if their area goes bad.. No politician wants that. It's a coordination problem. Ideally there's be a liquid market shipping ventilators around to where they are most needed, but right now, everybody wants to keep theirs. That's why the fed is supposed to be the coordinator and supplier of extra liquidity to the places that need it most. But anway, ventilators are only part of the problem.. Need negative pressure rooms, ICU beds, AND the nurses and doctors who know how to operator them AND protect them with PPE so they don't all get sick and then you have a bunch of useless equipment and beds. And even if you keep them from getting sick with PPE, how long do you keep them from burning out if the case loads keeps increasing day after day for weeks? FLATTEN THE CURVE, STAY HOME, and let's hope leaders start listening to people who know what they're talking about...We know what to do, others have done it, just have to explain it well to everybody and actually do it: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56

Looking at the total cases chart, it took from January to March 5 to get to 100k cases. It took from March 5th to March 24th to get to 400k. And most places, curves at still in their early, steep parts...

CEO of Flexport on the supply chain challenges of getting enough PPE to frontline workers: https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1242490035707895808?s=20 (thread)

This isn't politics. This is a public health issue, and not a theoretical one. The person in charge is incompetent to deal with it. If you want to pretend this is politics, fine, but it isn't. I don't care he's right or left, blue or red, purple or orange. if he was acting rationally and competently in the face of the COVID19 threat, I'd applaud, but he's not, so I'm explaining why I think that is. Now stay civil or get out.

Of course his first priority is himself. He's a narcissistic personality disorder and likely a sociopath. He doesn't care about reopening for "the economy" in general, he knows this current path doesn't lead him to get re-elected, and it's really bad for his hotels and resorts and his debt payments, and if he's out of power it's dangerous that he'll be investigated without pardon power, so he's ready to gamble it all and put all his chips on 15 black and spin the wheel in the hope that this other approach may be better for his election and businesses. He's been incredibly lucky all his life, born to wealth, getting away with all kinds of stuff, becoming president.. He's just gambling with lots of lives and the US healthcare system in the balance that his luck will hold. And he didn't know back then. He's not intellectually capable to have understood the implications when it was still theoretical, and he's surrounded by yes-men and he fires or drives away anyone who's independent-minded pretty quickly. Can you even imagine him reading complex briefings and diving into the details? He thinks in cable-TV soundbytes. Listen to him talk about any of this and it's just a bunch of word-salad "it's great, going tremendous, big effort"... No real understanding. Even now as people are dying and hospitals are being quickly turned into disaster zones, he's not listening to the people who know what they're talking about, he's driving away Fauci and contradicting his task force on TV and picking petty fights with desperate governors who need federal help. He's likely never even spoke to anyone on the front lines of this and shows zero empathy for anyone dealing with this, only worry for himself veiled in language about "the economy" (which was how he always said he measured his presidency, always talking about stock market records, etc).

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/24/bill-gates-us-missed-its-chance-to-avoid-coronavirus-shutdown.html https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/3/24/21192638/coronavirus-bill-gates-trump-reopen-business "Bill Gates says we can’t restart the economy soon and simply “ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner”"

https://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2020/03/coronavirus-getting-angry.html

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-24/coronavirus-less-deadly-in-germany-because-of-youthful-patients

https://peterattiamd.com/samharris2/ New podcast by Peter Attia with Sam Harris about the COVID19 situation.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/fnszg7/serious_when_did_covid19_get_real_for_you/

How do you explain Taiwan, SK, Japan? They are still open for business. You are just ignoring facts that don't suit your argument. They did what the experts said, they just did it faster and harder, so now they could reopen (while staying very vigilant with testing, contact tracing, lots of mask wearing, social distancing, etc). That ship has sailed for the US. These countries prove my point.

Doing the opposite of what all the people who know what they're talking about say and what all the other successful countries in this crisis have done isn't going to be a good idea. It should be criminal negligence to totally destroy a country's healthcare capability and kill a large number of its citizens because it may help with someone's election/personal hotel and resort businesses (but probably not even that).

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-24/on-coronavirus-wartime-president-trump-lacks-leadership

So he's basically aiming for doing worse than Italy... https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/23/coronavirus-trump-says-businesses-could-reopen-soon-while-fighting-covid.html Let's hope this thing just happens to be highly seasonal and his dumb luck holds one more time.

I agree. I think people would have a whole lot more confidence if they let those “can do“ people do the talking rather than the muppets in the Oval Office. I think at least one “hotel hospital“ in my area is being worked on for needed surge capacity right now as I learned though my wife, They should turn over the whole thing to the epidemiologists and the army engineers and such, get the politicians out of the daily briefings.

I was wondering when Trump would get bored of talking about coronavirus. It's about two things: His hotels and resorts (and how much he's hurt financially), and his gambling that this might be better for the election.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/health/coronavirus-restrictions-us.html Also, maybe now would be a good time to lift the tariffs on China and others...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-signals-growing-weariness-with-social-distancing-and-other-steps-advocated-by-health-officials/2020/03/23/0920ea0a-6cfc-11ea-a3ec-70d7479d83f0_story.html