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Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Place with No Lockdown maybe Sweden, Brazil, South Korea...maybe USA but it could be argued the USA did have some levels of high restrictions and lockdown, the USA certainly did not have zero lockdowns as some individual States had strong lock-down measures, it becmae a political Left vs Right thing in the USA.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I INCLUDED SNIPS FROM THE ORIGINAL ARTICLES AND THEIR LINKS BECAUSE I KNOW THUGR WILL CLAIM THAT IT'S NOT NEWS, ITS PROPAGANDA.

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One of the great mysteries of the pandemic is why so many countries followed China’s example. In the U.S. and the U.K. especially, lockdowns went from being regarded as something that only an authoritarian government would attempt to an example of “following the science.” But there was never any science behind lockdowns — not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic. When you got right down to it, lockdowns were little more than a giant experiment.

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The Bush team’s final document, published by the CDC in February 2007, stopped short of mandating lockdowns but came as close as its authors dared, calling for the use of “social distancing measures to reduce contact between adults in the community and workplace.” One of the leaders of the effort, a government scientist named Richard Hatchett, would later tell Lewis what he really believed: “One thing that’s inarguably true is that if you got everyone and locked each of them in their own room and didn’t let them talk to anyone, you would not have any disease.”

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Today, the world is almost a controlled experiment in pandemic response, and the returns are already unmistakable: The nations that took the most aggressive actions, most quickly, have fared best, and those that have moved cautiously, waiting for undeniable prompts to action, have done worst. In South Korea, the implementation of what is effectively a medical surveillance state means that life in most of the country has continued mostly undisrupted, at least by the standards of Wuhan or the lockdowns now in Lombardy and New York and San Francisco; in the U.K. a strategy to stand down and let the virus pass through the population proved so disastrous that, within a few weeks, it was abruptly reversed; in Iran, they are digging mass graves big enough to be seen from space.

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At first it was just random resistance from rural or Mountain West areas hardly affected initially by the coronavirus pandemic. But now it’s spreading to places near COVID-19 hot spots where some people think restrictive measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus have gone too far, or are willing to take their chances (and force others to do the same) with deadly infection in order to keep their businesses, their jobs, or their “freedom” as they understand it.

By now it’s clear that there is an organized national effort to fight extended lockdown orders. It has already helped generate loud public protests in Michigan, Ohio, and Kentucky. And it’s probably going to spread nearly as rapidly as the coronavirus itself in the rich soil of anti-government subcultures where it’s widely accepted that “tyrants” are exploiting the emergency to impose their godless socialist views on freedom-loving but fearful Americans.

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Faced with the desperation of a disintegrating revenue base and spiraling needs for social spending, governors may be forced to risk the health of their citizens and try to gamble that they can restart the economy. The certainty of an unsolvable fiscal crisis, requiring massive cuts to education and health care, may outweigh the risk of a new outbreak. If the economy blossoms, Trump gets the credit. If the recovery sputters because people remain afraid to leave their homes, or if they do leave their homes and thousands of them die, then the governors who made the decisions get the blame.

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It’s been obvious from the get-go that the rapidly spreading protests against state coronavirus stay-at-home or “lockdown” orders were intensely ideological in nature, emanating from hard-core conservatives who didn’t much believe the pandemic was real or had objections to government-imposed restrictions of dangerous activities on various pseudo-constitutional grounds. And it’s also been apparent that these protests were not spontaneous but largely the product of local, state, or national coordination by right-wing groups, many of them veterans of the tea-party movement that also began over a decade ago as a bunch of “plain citizens” in Revolutionary War garb and insignia who just happened to share the constitutional, fiscal, and economic policy views common among well-heeled K Street conservative lobbies and Republican pols.

There’s new reporting from the New York Times illustrating the connective tissue among these state protests, which (like the tea-party movement) has some grassroots elements but wouldn’t have gone very far without the artificial turf of national coordination.

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These groups need all the firepower they can get to give the protests the look of size and momentum, since polls show a sizable majority of Americans support the measures they are protesting, some of which have emanated from Republican governors and those trying to follow the Trump administration’s own guidelines. Their relationship with the White House is both stealthy and symbiotic, since they are keeping the president’s fingerprints off extremist activities he has clearly inspired, and that may help him mobilize supporters for his reelection campaign.

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Eventually the tea party became a self-conscious faction of the GOP before its anti-government and anti-Obama slogans were absorbed by the Republican Party so thoroughly that the imagined separation was no longer credible. In the hothouse atmosphere of the pandemic and the run-up to the 2020 elections, any claim that anti-lockdown demonstrators are independent from Team Trump probably won’t last as long as newly planted grass seeds in a cyclone.

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In the furor of demands to pare back coronavirus-related restrictions on business and other activities (a.k.a. “reopening America”), churches — particularly conservative Christian churches — have been very prominent. Given the considerable overlap these days between white Evangelicals and the Republican Party, it’s not surprising that the former share the latter’s rapidly growing inclination to view COVID-19-related public-health measures as a socialistic impingement on individual freedom and private enterprise.

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Soon, New York will start pulling up shutters and setting out chairs. Work-from-homers will venture beyond their neighborhoods from time to time. Employees will trickle back into offices. Housekeepers, electricians, dentists, and security guards will repopulate the subway, because they will have no choice. The city is gambling that we have learned enough in these past months to keep the risks under control — that masks, distance, hygiene, and anxiety will keep us, if not exactly safe, then safe-ish. With no cure, no vaccine, and limited treatment, we have to rely on our own behavior and that of everyone around us. We have to trust our fellow New Yorkers to stay home at the first sign of the sniffles, to share our habits of caution, to wait for the next train if necessary, to step politely aside. We have to trust the MTA to keep crowds thin, employers to think through workplace logistics, the transportation department to dissolve the knots where pedestrians might jam the sidewalks, the school system to have a plan for a million kids that will protect their families too. Lockdown was easy compared to this.

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The U.S. passed 2 million total coronavirus cases last week, reaching the mark just six weeks after it hit 1 million. According to Reuters, “Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, North Carolina, Oklahoma and South Carolina all had record numbers of new cases” in the past week.

Columbia University virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen wrote on Twitter Monday that Arizona, Alabama, North Carolina, and South Carolina need to go back on lockdown “like NOW.”

“At least 4 states are going to need to reinstitute stay-home orders this week–like NOW–to stop upward case trajectories,” she wrote. “This pandemic is still going on. We failed to use the time we bought to prepare & build capacity. We reopened before we were ready. Now we pay.”

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Almost as soon as the first marches to protest the killing of George Floyd began, in Minneapolis on May 26, conservatives and COVID contrarians seized on the rallies as a case study of liberal coronavirus hypocrisy. If the disease spread rapidly through the assembled protesters, they felt, it would show that those who’d spent the spring scolding Americans for resisting lockdowns didn’t care as much about public health as they did about advancing their own set of political values. (Liberals, of course, would put it differently: that the cause was worth the risk.) If there were relatively few new cases, the thinking went, it would demonstrate that the lockdowns themselves were unnecessary.

Three weeks later, we have the first results from the natural experiment: Across the country, from Minneapolis to California and New York City to Albany, the protests produced, at most, very few additional cases of COVID-19. The same, more or less, was observed in the aftermath of the much-derided Lake of the Ozarks Memorial Day party (where one sick partygoer may have infected as many as … one other). Does this mean we’re out of the COVID-19 woods, all clear for mass gatherings and the end of social distancing, and that the intrusive and intensely burdensome lockdowns of the spring were excessive? Well, no. The same week, a major study led by Berkeley’s Solomon Hsiang exploring the effect of lockdowns across the world found that, in the U.S., social distancing and shelter-in-place guidelines prevented as many as 60 million additional cases (since, at least in the early days of the epidemic, many more are believed to have been infected than were tested for the disease). And if those measures had been implemented sooner and more effectively, one review suggests, between 70% and 99% of American deaths could have been avoided. Instead of 120,000 deaths, we might have had fewer than 2,000.

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By midsummer, as the coronavirus receded throughout most of the world, Trump’s supporters were engaging in cultlike displays of devotion. Republicans were pointedly holding mask-optional gatherings. “When the good Lord calls you home,” one Republican Senate candidate explained, “a mask ain’t going to stop it.” As masks became symbols of subservience to public health (“COVID burkas,” as former Trump official Sebastian Gorka called them), these people even held rallies to protest them. A county Republican Party chairman in Kansas who owns a weekly newspaper published a cartoon depicting face masks as yellow stars and the people bearing them as Jews forced into cattle cars.

In Scottsdale, Arizona, a Republican city councilmember announced, “I can’t breathe!” before dramatically removing his face covering. A Republican sheriff in Ohio, despite a statewide facial-covering requirement, declared, “I’m not going to be the mask police. Period.” The first day that Oregon governor Kate Brown imposed a requirement that residents wear masks in public, four police officers walked into a coffee shop in Corvallis mask-free, and when asked to comply with the order, they yelled, “Fuck Kate Brown!” In recent weeks, more than 20 county health officials have left their jobs in the face of protests, harassment, and threats. Georgia governor Brian Kemp went so far as to ban local governments from mandating masks.

In late June, Trump staged an indoor rally in Tulsa. His staff removed stickers on seats intended to space out attendees. Announcing his presence, Cain wrote, “Masks will not be mandatory for the event, which will be attended by President Trump. PEOPLE ARE FED UP!” (A few days after the rally, Cain tested positive.)

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And they will be tapping into a deep vein of paranoia. Polls have shown somewhere between a quarter and a third of the public already does not intend to take a vaccine when it becomes available. In a country with a cult of self-reliance so ingrained that every new mass shooting propels more panicked arms purchases, is an act of collective, mutual security like public vaccination even workable?

The truly remarkable thing about the right-wing revolt against public health is that it has taken place under a president whom conservatives trust and adore. From the standpoint of running the government, these have been awful conditions for handling a pandemic. But from the standpoint of persuading citizens to cooperate, they have been almost optimal. When we look back a year from now at the frenzied, angry revolt against science, the spring and summer of 2020 may seem like halcyon days.

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President Trump repeatedly attacked and denigrated the nation’s most respected infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, on Monday. Trump first started in on Fauci during a call with his campaign staff, and then publicly on Twitter. Later at a campaign rally, Trump warned that his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, would actually listen to Fauci’s advice. The new insults came, not coincidentally, one day after Fauci said on 60 Minutes that he was “not surprised” that the president had caught COVID-19, confirmed that the White House has been restricting his media appearances — and revealed that he has received death threats amid the pandemic.

Trump called Fauci “a disaster” during a morning call aimed at rallying his staff for the final stretch of his flagging reelection campaign. But going after Fauci is a puzzling tactic, to say the least. Polls have consistently shown that Americans approve of and trust the top public-health official far more than they do Trump or anyone else with regard to the pandemic. In addition, Trump’s mishandling of COVID-19, which has killed nearly 220,000 Americans and is currently prompting a third wave of cases around the country, appears to be the most significant reason he is falling further behind Biden in the polls.

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“They’re getting tired of the pandemic, aren’t we?” Trump also said during his rally in Arizona on Monday. “You turn on CNN. That’s all they cover. COVID, COVID, pandemic. COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID. Wha, uh-uh. You know why? They’re trying to talk people out of voting. People aren’t buying it, CNN, you dumb bastards.”

Pandemic fatigue is real, of course, but annoyance doesn’t make the virus go away. And COVID-19 continues to be a massive story across the media because it continues to be a massive crisis across the country — and it’s getting worse as the U.S. heads into what Dr. Fauci and most other experts warn will be the most difficult phase of the pandemic yet. But instead of talking about flattening the curve, Trump keeps crazily claiming that the country is rounding the corner to recovery — and now appears to be jealous of not only Fauci and Biden’s popularity, but how much more attention the pandemic gets than him.

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In 2003, SARS had been eliminated after only 8,000 infections; its biggest foothold outside Asia was in Canada, which reported just a few hundred suspected cases. With COVID, Sridhar says, “I was following the response in China. They went into lockdown. You saw New Zealand pivoting that way and then Australia after.” But not the U.K., where an erratic series of scientific advisories pushed the government first to embrace a target of herd immunity, then to backpedal, but not enough. Sridhar describes those advisories with retrospective horror, an inexplicable preemptive surrender by the public-health apparatus.

“Basically, going back to January, they’d be like, ‘China’s not going to control it; 80 percent of the population is going to get it; all efforts to contain it are going to fail; we have to learn to live with this virus; contact tracing and testing make no sense; this is going to be everywhere; right now we need to build up hospitals’ — which they didn’t even do. But they really didn’t think it was stoppable,” she says. “And then all of a sudden you started to see, in February, South Korea stopping it, Taiwan stopping it, and China stopping it. Then, in March, New Zealand. And then Australia. And then there’s this realization of, ‘Oh, wow. Actually, it is controllable.’”

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Basically, going back to January, they’d be like, ‘China’s not going to control it; 80 percent of the population is going to get it; all efforts to contain it are going to fail; we have to learn to live with this virus; contact tracing and testing make no sense; this is going to be everywhere; right now we need to build up hospitals’ — which they didn’t even do. But they really didn’t think it was stoppable,” she says. “And then all of a sudden you started to see, in February, South Korea stopping it, Taiwan stopping it, and China stopping it. Then, in March, New Zealand. And then Australia. And then there’s this realization of, ‘Oh, wow. Actually, it is controllable.’”

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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Basically, going back to January, they’d be like, ‘China’s not going to control it; 80 percent of the population is going to get it; all efforts to contain it are going to fail; we have to learn to live with this virus; contact tracing and testing make no sense; this is going to be everywhere; right now we need to build up hospitals’ — which they didn’t even do. But they really didn’t think it was stoppable,” she says. “And then all of a sudden you started to see, in February, South Korea stopping it, Taiwan stopping it, and China stopping it. Then, in March, New Zealand. And then Australia. And then there’s this realization of, ‘Oh, wow. Actually, it is controllable.’”

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I'm not sure what the point of posting this is.

China controlled Covid with draconian localized (or in some cases regional) lockdowns. They basically outwaited the virus until it had mutated to a less-lethal form.

S Korea: severe lockdowns. Indoor mask wearing, limits on indoor gatherings to 10 people etc.

Australia: severe lockdowns

New Zealand: severe lockdowns.

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Originally posted by SIX
Basically, going back to January, they’d be like, ‘China’s not going to control it; 80 percent of the population is going to get it; all efforts to contain it are going to fail; we have to learn to live with this virus; contact tracing and testing make no sense; this is going to be everywhere; right now we need to build up hospitals’ — which they didn’t even do. But they really didn’t think it was stoppable,” she says. “And then all of a sudden you started to see, in February, South Korea stopping it, Taiwan stopping it, and China stopping it. Then, in March, New Zealand. And then Australia. And then there’s this realization of, ‘Oh, wow. Actually, it is controllable.’”

SIGNY: I'm not sure what the point of posting this is.
China controlled Covid with draconian localized (or in some cases regional) lockdowns. They basically outwaited the virus until it had mutated to a less-lethal form.

S Korea: severe lockdowns. Indoor mask wearing, limits on indoor gatherings to 10 people etc.

Australia: severe lockdowns

New Zealand: severe lockdowns.

SIX: It appears to me that you do understand the point of posting that.

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And correspondingly low death rates. This seems to be saying that if you're dealing with a highly contagious disease by restricting contacts, you have to be strict about it bc half-assed measures are going to get you half-assed results.

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Allegedly.

My whole point, which it would appear that you didn't get, is that New York Magazine is now saying that the lockdowns were a mistake and that they were George W. Bush's fault. All while having the gall to put this in print:

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One of the great mysteries of the pandemic is why so many countries followed China’s example. In the U.S. and the U.K. especially, lockdowns went from being regarded as something that only an authoritarian government would attempt to an example of “following the science.” But there was never any science behind lockdowns — not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic. When you got right down to it, lockdowns were little more than a giant experiment.

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Could the kinds of lockdowns that are achievable in the real world, where hundreds of millions of people can’t live in isolation chambers, be an effective tool against a pandemic? Did the virus truly go away during a lockdown or simply hide, waiting to reemerge when it ended? And finally, did the many social, economic, and medical downsides make them, in the aggregate, not worth whatever short-term benefits they might yield?

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And then I posted a dozen of their articles out of the dozens that they'd written demonizing anybody who was against the lockdowns and praising countries like China who were murdering citizens who dared leave their houses.

The kids today are borderline retarded. We're going to lose half a generation of kids

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who are going to grow up barely able to wipe their own asses they're going to be so stupid as adults.

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The world economy is shit.

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Countless old people died alone without their loved ones being there to comfort them.

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All so a bunch of scared little Karens could feel safe, while the Government flexed it's enormous power over everyone, and took away their livelihoods if they didn't allow an experimental jab into their body.

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We don't even know the fallout from that part yet. It's not going to be good.

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And I'll be right here to tell New York Magazine to fuck right off when they admit the vaccination mandates and the vaccines themselves were a mistake and they were Trump's fault.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
You were wrong when you said nobody ever died of Covid, and you were wrong when you predicted a red wave in last Congressional elections and you were wrong when you predicted Trump would win the election. You were also wrong to call for the killing of all Muslims.

You make these statements when you're swept with emotion, but they're not always based on fact or logic or, dare I say, science. Intuition is a powerful driver. Great discoveries were made by intuition, but altho it may feel infallible, it's not.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
You were wrong when you said nobody ever died of Covid.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Quote: and you were wrong when you predicted Trump would win the election.

No I wasn't.

You are still ignoring the point of the thread.

Stay on topic.

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Quote: and you were wrong when you predicted Trump would win the election.

No I wasn't.

You are still ignoring the point of the thread.

Stay on topic.

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The only point I see Trumptards ever making is that they are loudmouth losers and they are very angry. Your thread is more of the same Trumptard bitching about not being respected as much as you imagine deserving. Life is tough for losers in America. See Trump's continuing trials and tribulations for example. It is always a mystery to stupid people about why bad things happen to them. The answer to why is a tautology: You are stupid. It is impossible for bad things not to continuously happen to stupid people in this complex world.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The kids today are borderline retarded. We're going to lose half a generation of kids

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I teach 12th grade English and I know for a fact that many of our students are unable to read. They get by with a combination of cheating and bullshitting and manipulating the system. If they fail a class they take it on the online grade recovery program which is very easy to cheat. We're totally handing diplomas to people who can't read above the level of a Dr. Suess book.

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Yep. Every year, like clockwork, once 15-25% of my students realize that my class requires actual effort, they fail my class on purpose so that they can do the online grade recovery program later instead.

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ha, me too. Civics teacher for 11/12. Only me and the 10th grade bio teacher hold the kids to standards. You'd think the 75 pages of reading (from a book that has maybe 150 words a page) over the course of a quarter is child abuse.

Kid failed my class a few years ago, just opted to go on her phone every day. Hey, I don't care, you're 18, time to start being responsible for your own decisions. Well admin let her take a 'recovery' that let her get credit for the entire quarter in just 3 hours of work. So that's cool. Why even employ me

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Probably shouldn't spread this around or you will have more kids doing that and will really be out of a job

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Yep. I'm in my first year as a full time teacher in a high school Business Ed department. My classroom is a computer lab. The kids put far more effort into cheating and forging anything and everything they can than anything else. About half of each class period is capable of turning something in on time, even when I give them a week to turn in stuff and don't assign homework. Spelling, reading, and basic math skills are atrocious. All the school admin cares about is how many industry certifications we can get. So, may as well let the kid cheat I guess.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

New York Magazine is trying to rewrite history.



You also know very well that I'm the smartest person remaining in the RWED after JO left dude.

Who are you kidding?

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
You were wrong when you said nobody ever died of Covid.

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No I wasn't.

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and you were wrong when you predicted a red wave in last Congressional elections

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No I wasn't.

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and you were wrong when you predicted Trump would win the election.

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No I wasn't.

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You were also wrong to call for the killing of all Muslims.

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No I wasn't.


You are still ignoring the point of the thread.

Stay on topic.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

BTW, none of those diseases have any treatment, so prevention is the only measure available.

And I wouldn't make them mandatory, either. I mean, if you feel happy without any sort of protection, then, yanno, feel free! But if you're a parent, or taking care of the very elderly who may not be able to make decisions for themselves, you have to be responsible for them too.

But if you fail to take precautions, I wouldn't move heaven in earth to get those people medical care, either. They live or die with their decision.

Same as with any vaccine not rigorously safety tested. Should be optional.

That kind of prep, tho, is far FAR beyond what our society can achieve! But god help is if we should ever encounter something like airborne Ebola (which ran rampant thru a monkey breeding house in Reston VA The Hot Zone ) or the Spanish Flu or MERS or human-to-human bird flu. There were be dunderheads in denial, and it would be impossible for any thinking person to trust anything that the government mandated.

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