Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

whens dinner?

 

Some news about why the U.S. was slow to develop tests: contamination at the CDC lab developing the test delayed delivery of the test for weeks.

Contamination at CDC lab was likely cause of critical early delays in rolling out testing - CNNPolitics

Government employees can't be bothered to read their own instructions . . .

 

sign me up. The thought of that middle party scares the crap out of the pubs and the dems and that is why they both continue to throw red meat to their fringes to try and keep the polarization up,

 

The problem with a hypothetical center party is that we don't agree on the big issues lol. Abortion and healthcare are two big issues that would cause a lot of friction in the hypothetical center party.

 

I think we both agree that we don't like our bedfellows, but I'm not sure we make significantly better bedfellows either. That's the challenge.

 

funding cuts does not always leave the best and the brightest in the lab...

 

Also why they push the lie that a third party vote is a wasted vote.

 

I need a party that is domestically liberal and conservative on foreign policy. JFK or RFK Dem. type party.

 

Well, as the system is now, it is a wasted vote.

 

Actually there is a pretty good consensus on abortion. Most people are likely OK with late term restrictions on "convenience" abortions, but are to some extent pro-choice before that late term restriction. Mostly only religious extremists take the position of banning all abortions from conception or banning the morning after pill (same people that also get in the way of sex education and other contraceptive measures or health services). This is actually a 70% issue. Not a 50-50 issue.

Healthcare is different because there are a number of options on the table, and people are generally confused about them. Reminds me of the Obamacare polling where it was mostly 50-50, but you ask a person about some of the individual benefits and most or all of those polled substantially higher than 50-50.

 

Yes and no. I think people are willing to compromise, but the conversations rarely start that way.

 

The idea that not voting for a team that finishes in first or second means that your vote is wasted has always been a silly concept.

Go GATORS!
,WESGATORS

 

Regarding the last paragraph, in a number of early polls when respondents were asked whether they favored Obamacare, more respondents answered in the negative than the affirmative. When the term "Affordable Care Act (ACA)" was substituted for "Obamacare" a majority of the same respondents indicated that they supported the legislation and as you correctly pointed out, when asked whether or not they supported the specific provisions of the act, a significant majority answered in the affirmative.

 

The problem is with primarily with the religious extremists who believe that human life begins at conception and that a zygote the size of a head of a pin is as much a human being as a full-term baby or even a child or adult. To those individuals any compromise would be countenancing murder. As @BLING pointed out a majority of voters would be fine with a compromise under which later term restricted. As point of information only slightly over one percent of all abortions are performed after the 20th week of gestation and very few of those are performed as "birth control of last resort".

 

And maybe it's just because they have to cater to the extremists in the party, but more moderate GOP politicians seem to take those same stances.

 

Folks, let's not turn this into a thread on abortion.

 

Trump on podium today continues to disappoint. Utterly divisive. He will go down as the most incompetent man to hold the office.

“If I wasn’t elected we’d be at war with NK. If I wasn’t elected the world would be over. We had no ammunition. Obama left us with no weapons and no ventilators”.

 

Frankly, the slides that Birx put up today were concerning. For example, they put up a slide talking about how great we were doing compared to other countries. Suspiciously absent: Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Denmark, etc. They cherry picked the worst hit spots, threw on Germany, Iran, and China to complain about the latter two primarily, and ignored any data that they didn't like.

Thinking as a local of New Orleans, they have put up slides about how everything is getting better here for the last couple of days. While there is some truth to that, this city shut down hard. That is the amount of testing you need when all the college students in the city leave to go home, the residents do not go out, and almost everybody here uses a mask and gloves when we go grocery shopping. If we start going out again, we will need to ramp up testing considerably.

 

If the country had New York’s death per million there would be 270,000 dead right now.

We don’t. But that shows what happens when this thing gets out of control.

The lack of a comprehensive national plan for testing, side be side with “Liberate” texts and emotional pushes to open up is cause for concern.

We all want to open up. Happy talk isn’t the right path. The right path is a massive effort to set up effective testing, tracing and isolation programs.