Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

Missouri announces shutdown

Missouri coronavirus stay-at-home order starts Monday, governor says

Missouri’s governor announced a statewide stay-at-home coronavirus order Friday, leaving only a handful of states without one.

Gov. Mike Parson’s order, which takes effect Monday, says Missourians should avoid leaving their homes except for essential activities like work, food or medical care. Restaurants may stay open if they offer takeout or delivery and schools have been ordered to close, FOX 2 in St. Louis reported.

“There comes a time when we have to make major sacrifices in our lives. Many of us make sacrifices each and every day, but now more than ever, we must all make sacrifices,” the governor said in a news conference Friday.

Parson had resisted such an order for weeks, opting to leave enforcement to the local level. Most of St. Louis and Kansas City areas, Springfield and Columbia are already under local stay-at-home orders, according to FOX 4 in Kansas City.

 

That whole “normalizing the data” concept is tough to get, I understand. Bless your heart.

 

Full on party. Beer pong in driveway, 20 cars, idiots afoot.
The stupidity kills me.

 

You're right, my bad on the extra zero. Your score of 100 on this exam is actually a 10.
You're right, my bad on the extra zero, your price on this $10 tool is actually $100.
You're right, my band on the extra zero, the price of your rent is $10,000, not $1000.

Save the decades long hyperbole for reasonable estimates - perhaps those within a factor of 10.

 

It’s not an either/or digital choice.

There is always more than one way to skin a cat. We just panicked and picked the one that’s going to bring a huge veterinary bill

 

Here's a conservative angle for you: If this was a concern, you should have planned well in advance and accounted for this potential. This libbie's bar is well-stocked. If you're down, you are welcome to come on up and hang at my personal bar. . . As long as you can stay 6'+ away. I've got some good stuff!

 

Lol.

you claimed we were testing more than anyone. It’s true on raw numbers but not nearly true based on population. Instead, of just saying, “yeah, that’s true”, you use a purposely misleading example and then thought that would dismiss it. Of course not mentioning the fact that the 2 countries that have been held up as models for how to handle this to date, Germany and SK, are significantly ahead of us on that metric, and did what experts have been clamoring for since day 1. We are getting better, but we aren’t nearly where we need to be.
But unless you have something substantive to come back with other than “Hey Austria so nice try”, I will let that speak for itself.

 

There’s nothing unreasonable about it. This will make 2008-2010 look like the UF-FSU game this year.

Do you really think that this economy is just going snap back up to where it was at the end of February when the “authorities” tell us it’s safe to go out and play?

There are going to be a lot of laid off people who won’t be called back immediately. There are many more who will get called back right away and then furloughed again in a month or two when their employer’s revenue isn’t recovering.

Hair stylists, nail techs, servers, cooks, hostesses, bussers, dental hygienists, physical therapists, people who own or work in fitness centers, referees and umpires who rely on spring and summer sports for extra income and hundreds of others have already lost more than the $1200 in aid and extra unemployment that they were making.

How many companies are going to start letting their interns scheduled for this summer that they won’t be open or can’t afford them any more?

How stable will the blood supply be after this donation hiatus and people’s fears from now going forward.

How many people will cancel home renovation projects either because they no longer have the money or because they don’t want strangers in their homes.

All of these things are not just possible, like contracting a virus. They are highly likely if not dead set certainties!

Quibble if you want boys and girls, but the costs and ramifications of this panic will be with us for a long, long time, and cause a great deal of pain for a great many people.

 

Thanks for your sincere and meaningful response. The difference is though, that you can't equate probability with severity of consequence. Yes, thousands of people are losing their jobs. Likewise, though, thousands are losing their lives. Often it requires losing a loved one before someone understands the disparity of consequence. It's an inane comparison, but for the sake of consideration, would you trade your daughter's life for 1000 American jobs? It's a matter of perspective.

 

You should be. They have a much smaller government to test those people. When you have 300 million people and didn't contain the disease locally, you absolutely have to do massive amounts of raw testing. The fact that we have multiple hot spots that are still massively backlogged in testing shows a shortage in testing. The requirements to effectively test in order to monitor this disease increases with the curve of cases. If we were testing this amount weeks ago, then we would probably be okay. But nope, still a shortage, bro.

 

I would want to wait for all of the facts to come out before I would answer your hypothetical.

I have a sneaking suspicion we will find out that many of those who die will be because they had an unfortunate intersection of a pre-existing health issue and waiting too long to seek treatment out of ignorance about the virus or outright fear of finding out they have it.

I do have a friend who had symptoms similar to these in mid February. She waited over almost two weeks to seek medical attention out of fear. Her brother and I finally convinced her of the lunacy of her thinking and he took her to an ER. Thankfully, she won, but her victory would have been much easier if she went in earlier. If she had waited much longer she probably wouldn’t have fun.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for reasonable precautions, but what we have done is going to end up hurting more people than Coronavirus ever would have.

 

Your ranking previously was deaths per capita now it is just by number of deaths

 

all of that is fair. And as morbid as it sounds, it is fair to put a dollar judgment on a life, companies do it every day. Airlines, insurance companies, etc etc. We have already made the value judgment as a country that 30k deaths a year on average from the flu is acceptable and we take no major action to stop it as far as restrictions. For this, the vast majority of Americans have made a value judgment that the lives win. If you run some basic numbers it is easy to under and why. Assume 1/3 of the country got it, 1.5 percent death rate (currently the average for the country handling it the best in Germany, that would mean 1.65 million deaths roughly. And once we hit a point where hospitals were overloaded, the death rate would skyrocket because treatable people would die without care, as would people suffering from unrelated conditions who couldn’t get a hospital bed (see Italy).
But what’s more, once those people started dying in mass numbers, most would completely self segregate anyway, heck most would do it now without government orders. My company went WFH before any government suggestions came out. The economy is pretty much screwed either way, so we may as well protect Americans in the process.
Jmo.

 

As a public we have been lulled into thinking this isn't a massive deal because we have vaccines and we have modern medicine. We don't recognize or appreciate anything close to well enough the incredible potential danger of an uncontrolled disease spread for which we are defenseless against. Look back to 1918, 1300s, 1500s as a place to begin this process.

 

What do you think happens to the economy if 2 million people die due to a pandemic?

 

OklahomaGator's previous ranking was deaths per capita but the last chart was just by the number of deaths thus Florida did not jump 19 spots

 

It's a no win scenario. Had we not shut down, more cities today would look like NYC. Thousands more would be in the hospital and hundreds more would be dying on top if the over 1,000 a day that are dying in this country. Anyone think we wouldn't have shut down anyway?

Economies recover. Dead people don't. We've been in a bull market for over a decade. We were due for a recession. In this scale all things equal? No, but we've been through bad times before and survived. We'll do it again.

 

Even the people who refused to shut down for a long time are giving in. Look at DeSantis. The idea that we could all just ignore this and live our lives or that there was another clear answer to solve this thing comes off as denial to me. As others pointed out, some businesses were shutting down before the government did. There was a way to avoid this, but we missed the window on it, unlike South Korea.

 

It would seem to me that it would be easier to recover from a self-imposed recession than one like 2008. I think back to Volcker imposing a recession in the early 80's to get inflation under control. We came out of that recession relatively quickly and saw a big boom after it.