Cornonavirus Outbreak Causes MLB to Suspend Games
It’s been less than a week and already Major League Baseball has a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on their hands.
Major League Baseball’s season is less than a week old, but one team has already experienced a coronavirus outbreak that will sideline a chunk of its roster and has caused a game to be canceled. The Miami Marlins, who had four players test positive during their opening series against the Philadelphia Phillies, had an additional eight players and two coaches test positive on Monday, less than 12 hours before they were supposed to play their home opener against the Baltimore Orioles, according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan.
That means the Marlins have had at least 14 individuals become infected over the last several days. In response to the outbreak, the Marlins game against the Orioles on Monday night will not be played, Baltimore GM Mike Elias confirmed.
The Yankees-Phillies game for tonight (Monday, 27Jun20) has now been “postponed”.
The Marlins’ home opener in Miami against Baltimore is also postponed.
Well that makes it a four game season? I suspect this portends badly for everyone else that wants to reopen in the fall including schools and colleges/universities. In other news, Google stated employees would be working from home until July 2021.Report
Most federal agencies are still on max practical telework as well.Report
I watched deGrom and Kyle Hendricks dominate from the mound; saw Mike Trout grind out some great at-bats; witnessed history when Stanton hit the first HR as an official-not-a-gimmick National League DH; saw Mookie get his first hit as a Dodger…
So many memories.Report
Hendricks game was a beauty.
Cubs in 1st, let’s go to playoffs.
Now that we have DH in NL… let’s just do Hockey/NBA playoff model… perfunctory season to warm everyone up and set the pecking order; then the real season begins.Report
Agree. Just call it on the regular season, every team with at least one win makes the playoffs.
Hendricks performance was Maddux-like. With a fastball at 88 he makes you nibble your nails.”Will the hitter guess right this time? Oh no…”
Also, the first official NL DH HR wasn’t Stanton, of course, but Cespedes.
Man, what a great regular season!Report
Problem with my own idea is that I *hate* playoff baseball.
I’d honestly prefer an AL champ and NL champ based solely on the 162 game season… and leave it at that. If I’m feeling frisky, perhaps mid-season we divide both leagues into upper/lower divisions and weight the 2nd half schedules so better teams play better teams?
Coup de grace: introduce a writers association vote on which team was “better” based on mostly aesthetic grounds and declare them World Champ.
But I’ve been told my views are… idiosyncratic.
Whereas, with Hockey, I prefer playoff hockey… so there’s the rub.Report
Either this becomes normal and we ALL learn to live with it, or we shut back down until we agree to a better strategy. close contact sports like this are not going to go well, especially when teams are from hotspots. We really, really, really need to rethink a lot of things based on this pandemic.Report
The thing about the MLB is that they did not attempt to do a bubble like the NBA is or was considering. Maybe they discussed doing Arizona for a bit but playing games in Arizona during the summer sure sounds like hell.
There is a good point that COVID might become endemic without a vaccine and we will learn to deal with risk but right now we are still in the pandemic stage which is being made worse by COVID deniers and conspiracy mongers. The question of risk is who bears the burden and how much of a burden can we expect from the more risk adverse. I know quite a few people that have taken stay at home as strict as it can be taken and have more or less not left their house since February/March. This would make me insane and I am someone who takes it seriously and tries to be good.Report
The AARP put out a study today that says 1 in 4 teachers are at risk of severe long term symptoms of COVID. I think that’s the real economic burden that is not yet being factored into most people’s risk calculations – what happens to the hundreds of thousands of people sickened who are debilitated for months to years.Report
And yet we have no problem as a society making sure low wage grocery clerks go into work day in and day out. Delivery drivers. Essential businesses.
By the way, do you have a copy of that study?Report
Just to be clear, we require essential workers to go to work, knowing full well that their lives are endangered and many will die as a result.
We do this because food is essential and people can’t go for months without it.Report
Indeed. Many things are essential.
By the way, what is the infection rate for those grocery workers?Report
I was responding to Phillip’s point that opening schools will result in outbreaks among students, teachers and the families of the students.
Is it so essential to open schools such that the risk of outbreaks is warranted?Report
What are the levels of Covid-19 occurrence in grocery workers? Infection, hospitalization and death rates?Report
I honestly don’t know- you brought it up.
Why is this relevant to opening schools?Report
Most places don’t have enough strong contact tracing to have that kind of detail in any case. It would be good if we did though in this example there is a bit of difference between grocery stores and schools.Report
We don’t have any information on schools and teachers at this point, as we have closed all of them. OK, but we should have info on other essential workers of the same age rates and societal saturation levels.
IE both grocery stores and schools are present at every level of society and they are some of the most common workers in society. But, unlike teachers, grocery workers face hundreds if not thousands of potential virus carriers every day. And yet, they keep coming back to work, day in day out. They can’t all be asymptomatic, so it should give us data on transmission rates.
This should give us a whole host of information on whether it is safe to reopen schools. Not all the information, but some.Report
What we do know is that the transmission of the virus depends very heavily on human behavior;
Whether people are masked or unmasked; whether they are distant or close; whether they talk loudly or softly; whether they are in large or small groups;
Mostly, whether they have the discipline and maturity to maintain good practices.
I’m not seeing a lot of parallels to schools.Report
There’s a lot of information – particularly from our European friends – about how to reopen and run schools safely i.e. keeping down community transmissions and protecting staff and teachers from infection. Even the recently revised CDC guidelines have good pointers in that direction.
But most school districts and and state governments (who actually control this) are NOT reordering resources to implement those recommendations and lessons learned. All of the COVID relief bills – including the current one being worked up – don’t resource this.
And that’s why the start is such a problem.Report
Opening schools has somehow become a conservative ideology.
I mean I get Trump pushing it. Guy’s always been the “slap a coat of fresh paint on a junker, and sell it fast” sort of guy. Acting normal long enough to get the sucker to sign on the dotted line has been his MO for decades.
And I sort of get why many GOP politicians, especially governor’s who ought to know better, are having to follow along. Trump’s high popularity with the base makes defecting from his whims almost suicidal if you’re up for re-election. In what looks like a high-turnout election where the Dems are cruising at +8 on the generic ballot and Texas appears to be a toss-up, you can’t afford to take even a single point hit on your base.
It’s the others I’m deeply confused about, but then again I’m deeply confused about the people who scream masks in a pandemic are an affront to their freedoms, but being told they have to wear pants in public isn’t.
Honestly, I’m starting to wonder if it’s just Cleek’s Law again. Although that doesn’t explain Cuomo, who is not only pushing to re-open school, he’s doing so against what polling says parents want.
I mean maybe he buys into the weird belief that economic problems and pandemic problems are not the same thing — I mean that’s Abbot and Patrick’s belief — although it seems even a casual glance at the data showed the economy shriveling up in terror from COVID-19 even before governor’s started frantically trying to shut things down.Report
We could have closed grocery stores and mailed everyone a box with rice, beans, and apples every month. We didn’t do that. People would have revolted.
Instead, we’ll give kids the rice/beans/apples box equivalent of an education for the next year. And if we revolt about this, we’re told we want kids and teachers to die.
Me… I’ve been told I must want kids and teachers to die. That sure sounds like me.Report
This is why I responded as I did to Saul about the virus speaking.
Because the virus doesn’t care if we have good intentions or bad intentions, if we want people to die or not, whether we can or can’t revolt.
If people gather in close proximity, the virus spreads more easily than if they were distant.
If they are unmasked it spreads more easily.
If they speak loudly, or wipe their noses or mouths, it spreads more easily.
As far as I can see, children do all those things in school.Report
Well then, we have two options:
1. Close schools forever
2. Buckle down on adults — who can avoid doing all those things — incredibly hard and tight for a few weeks/months to get this thing under control so we can open schools and other things.
We seem to have chosen 1. Because god forbid the adults act like adults.
Johnny can’t goto school but Johnny’s dad can go play golf with friends and then have beers and steak afterward with them. Seems reasonable.Report
I think the unfortunate truth is we had our window in the Spring and failed. Trump put his perceived political interests first, instead of paying people not to work we let them suffer, and instead of exercising leadership too many governors re-opened way too early. Then the issue became doubly political after the peace riot defection of a big chunk of the more responsible of the two camps. Had everyone held out into June maybe we’d be in a different place but at the end of the day we’re just kind of a decadent, selfish, shitty culture that puts instant gratification ahead of everything else.
We’re on our way either to vaccine or herd immunity, whichever comes first, and it’s going to be a bumpy ride.Report
“Trump put his perceived political interests first, instead of paying people not to work we let them suffer”
Wait, so we didn’t give the unemployed $600 a week extra in unemployment benefits? We didn’t give everyone, no matter what, an extra $1000 to help the economy? Am I misremembering that?Report
Fair point. Saying we did nothing is an overstatement. But I’m not sure throwing extra cash into neglected systems barely adequate for the 21st century in the best of times changes my point much. That’s especially so when we let them be completely overwhelmed and allowed people to get stuck in the gears of arcane and puritanical rules enacted to combat the scourge of welfare queens.
Like, should we consider the PPP loans exploited by a bunch of big corporations a success? It was certainly a reaction but not a particularly effective one.Report
“We” is doing a lot of work here.
Parts of the country took aggressive steps, and are now doing much better.
Other parts did very little and are now ravaged.
Many parts are still not doing nearly enough and “We” will all be paying the price for a very long time.Report
I didn’t realize state lines on a map were force fields keeping corona in with the idiots.Report
We went from “two weeks to flatten the curve” to full lockdown with no true end in sight. Flattening would only alter the distribution of the curve, not what is under the curve. And now we are paying for that with deeply shitty politics, spastic government actions, and a serious hole in the economy. No part of the stimulus would ever be perfect, as it really wasn’t designed to be. It was designed to get money moving.
PPP loans were set up so that they would be easy to get. That means that all sorts of business’ would get them, no matter if they truly needed them. People found out quickly that they were making more with the extra $600 a week than they made normally (my son is a great example of this.) In reality, we as a nation (bipartisan!) decided to throw money around to look like we were doing something, when the real answer was probably to do as little as possible, knowing that a virus of the Corona sort (ie a new version of the common cold) was going to rip through the system and we just needed to get past it in the old fashioned way. But we can’t say that nationally. We need to Top! Men! an answer, any answer, to look like the political class, of either party, is worth what we pay them. The reality is that it isn’t an enemy invasion, it is a natural disaster. And sometimes you just need to deal.
Bottom line is that we are trying to second guess an insanely complex system, and no amount of modeling will tell us what to do as we don’t know the value of every variable. Or even what every variable is.Report
And yet…somehow…other nations around the world managed to control the virus with less damage and are now recovering.
America is in the group of Stupid Countries like where national leadership is incompetent or malevolent.Report
Really?
Australia just shuttered its internal borders:Victoria declares ‘state of disaster,’ locking down millions in Melbourne to fight a soaring coronavirus outbreak
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/02/australia/victoria-coronavirus-state-of-disaster-intl/index.html
Japan is having the virus run amok:
https://canoe.com/news/world/japan-traces-new-coronavirus-outbreak-linked-to-tokyo-theater
California is seeing record deaths in the last few days:
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/coronavirus-california-state-sees-record-number-of-deaths-on-four-separate-days/ar-BB17qBwJ
I mean, come on Chip, the only thing you are showing is how much you hate Trump.Report
Your links confirm my assertion.
The Australian government is taking drastic action in accordance with expert guidelines;
Japan has a small outbreak of 20 cases and is also taking serious testing and tracing action.
And last I checked, California was in America, that group of stupid countries where people aren’t taking the virus, or medical experts, seriously.
If it makes you feel better, I also will assert that Democratic governor Gavin Newsome did a stupid thing by reopening too early.
And as I posted below Germany is suffering an outbreak of stupidity as well.Report
Or, we should have never closed, like Sweden, who’s number of deaths is dropping daily. And yes, it could pop back up before herd immunity has been achieved.
Or, we could go full racist like New Zealand, shut the borders down, and pray that it is over and done with once we reopen, hoping against hope that it doesn’t pop up long after we have opened back up, and running through the population at that point.
The fact is that the whole experiment is being run by hysterical hypochondriacs. Australia and Japan had both masked or gone into lockdown, and yet, here we are. California had locked down, and yet, they have more deaths.
the lockdowns weren’t long enough/strict enough/selective enough ad nausaum is a false argument as there is zero evidence that it did anything, not least of which is because we decided, for good or for ill, that some political things were OK to break quarantine for; some areas have had very little to do with Coronavirus despite being locked down, and others are still locked down and showing more deaths.
We could have looked at the deaths in Italy, seen that the average age was 78+ with multiple comorbidities, and selectively shut down areas with large populations like that. We could have simply asked people to distance and voluntarily mask, and in the process not stripped them of their rights, but we didn’t. No, we treated the whole nation like children and are now watching the side effects of people not wanting to be treated like that, which often means agitating to be able to go back to normal. Despite the number of deaths.Report
“You’re not the boss of me!”
Epitaph for a nation of people who are not children, but behave like them.
America, as a nation, never locked down.
America never made any concerted national effort to reduce the spread of the virus. There are vast parts of the country where very few people ever wore masks, where bars were never shut, even still to this day.
Our national leadership was a miasma of misinformation, lies, and propaganda. The management was a swamp of corruption, incompetence and malign neglect.
Countries which took more serious action, which had a competent national leadership have gotten better results. By almost any metric, the US has had a worse outcome to this pandemic than almost any other of our peer nations.
Sorry, these are just facts. Yelling and screaming won’t change them.Report
What the hell are you smoking Chip?
Deaths per million;
Belgium 861.49
United Kingdom² 691.83
Spain 608.75
Peru 588.2
Italy 581.35
Sweden 563.58
Chile 500.66
USA² 464.06
The US is the fourth largest country, population-wise, and yet we are eighth on that list. But, let us look at the states, as that is how we are set up, legally; the greatest lockdown states have had the most deaths, and the least locked down states. North and South Dakota never locked down and had some the least death rates. New York and New Jersey both locked down and had tremendous death rates. Which was right? What was the correct number of days to lockdown?
Hell, even The Lancet, no conservative source by any measure, said that lockdowns are ineffective; Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(20)30208-X/fulltext
There is no single strategy to combat this. It isn’t a disease like Ebola, which spreads in a vastly different matter and something like contact tracing can work to slow its spread. No, you are looking to fight a version of the common cold, with most people either asymptomatic or getting only mild symptoms and moving on. There is no single strategy. Trying to fit everything in one neat box is a fool’s errand.
Sorry, these are just facts. Yelling and screaming won’t change them.Report
Look at cases, not deaths.
Deaths are a lagging indicator to cases.
The US still hasn’t hit its peak of cases.
We are at nearly 14,000 cases per million, higher than nearly any other country on earth.
Our death toll is still going to climb, for a long time to come.
Especially if we continue to do stupid stuff .
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-confirmed-cases-of-covid-19-per-million-peopleReport
The raw number of cases doesn’t mean anything. The number of asymptomatic cases could vastly outnumber the given statistics if they aren’t tested. (People don’t get tested if they don’t think they are sick) And testing only confirms if you were infected that day, as the symptoms can fade, or you could catch the disease hours after the test. Further, it leaves less room to correct for faulty information. Frankly, I expect those numbers to be an order of magnitude too low.
No, deaths are the metric as they are a solid foundation to build a case on. Yes, they lag but they don’t change. And currently, our death toll is dropping. At the height of the crisis, 2500 people were dying daily, now it is at what, 250? But, please, go on and move the goal post from all statistics to one statistic.
Tell me, did you cheer on the protests? Because if you did, it shows that you don’t even believe in your own argument, as you think there are more important things than a mere lockdown. Essential things even. And on that I agree, there are many more essential things than what the gov’t tells me are important, or not important.Report
Yesterday’s death toll in America was about 1,000, for the 6th day in a row.
Looking at daily deaths per million the US is still among the highest in the world, with only the South American nations like Bolivia and Brazil higher.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-cases-deaths?tab=table
And ours are still climbing- they were higher in July than June, and we have not yet done the really stupid stuff like reopening schools.Report
Again, did you support the protests?Report
I’m not saying that there’s no reason to believe that maybe going to the Cathedral to pray to the Virgin Mary for deliverance in 1348 might have been a less than ideal way to deal with the Black Plague.
I’m just saying that, in 1348, I wouldn’t have wanted to be one of the people arguing against it.
And would have quite enjoyed asking people to defend *NOT* doing it.Report
What we have here, a Coronavirus similar in many ways to the common cold, is vastly different than the Bubonic plague. This disease has a mortality rate of approx .26 for the numbers we have now. And let us also be very clear in that the only numbers we have are for testing of people who have reason to be checked. Not the asymptomatic, not those who have a very mild case, etc.
The Bubonic plague has a fatality rate of, if untreated a la 1348, 40-60%, and even now is running 15% treated. A far cry in my eyes. But, lest anyone think I am being blase about the virus do to my age and health, I take a rather industrial immunosuppressant three times a week. I know what the danger levels of this virus are. I simply do not think they are worth what we are doing to a society with either of the two main mandates, the lockdowns or the masks.
In previous posts, Chip has been a rather vocal proponent of the protests, even as they intensified. And in my eyes at least, it is rather hypocritical to bitch about how the nation’s virus response is so bad when he is one in support of a set of actions that, looking at the timing, increased the death rate that he is so in horror of.
One of the things I have said here at OT more than a few times is that there are three (3) aspects to the response to Covid-19; Health, Wealth, Liberty. And those three things need to be balanced. We could, theoretically, drop-ship everyone a load of rice, beans, and apples, shut everyone (and I mean everyone) inside for 12-18 months. and the virus would be eradicated. But so would the country. We would have destroyed our economy on every front and had all liberties as guaranteed by our constitution stripped away. If we had managed to not kill each of our family members. And so, what would be the point?
Many of us can work from home. But, there are a whole lot of people who cannot, not least of which is they allow us at home to have food and other sundries delivered. It seems rather churlish to assume that they have no outside life as we make sure that they are exposed to the virus we cower from.Report
To clarify: I wasn’t comparing the covid to the black plague.
I was comparing the questioning the faiths of people.Report
Indeed.Report
The UK and Sweden both went with unconventional strategies of minimal lock downs though. Italy got slammed very early on so had little info or direct experience. Peru and Chile are third world countries with far fewer resources. And that is supposed to make us look good? How does that work?
Why arent’ you showing the numbers of the many developed nations with far lower death rates?Report
I’d be more in agreement with you if we had actually flattened the curve. What we did was plateau it briefly and are now back to nearing exponential growth and the risk of overwhelming the system. That happened because of a real dearth of leadership at the federal and some state levels in April-May, pushed by our fool president and idiots that couldn’t bear to go without a haircut, then capped by an even bigger defections by people engaging in weeks of mass protest in June.
Even then you’re right in that it isn’t an invading army. It isn’t Cthulu coming out of the sea. But we haven’t handled this well. It doesn’t bode well for our capabilities in the event of a more serious threat. Even worse it doesn’t seem like we’re learning anything. It’s disappointing, especially because with a little discipline we probably would be in a much better place.Report
I agree with you that we could have had a much better response from Trump, I would have liked to see an economist and a civil liberties lawyer up on the stage with him in the daily press conferences.
But, I do think the lack of capability comes directly from our lack of political consensus. There has been so much, on both sides of the aisle, knee jerk reaction to whatever anyone of a conflicting opinion thinks is best. We aren’t talking as a nation anymore, just fighting.Report
There was undoubtedly real problems that emerged due to all the politicization. But at the end of the day, we revealed ourselves to be a pretty self-centered society. Everyone wanted to know when THEY would get back to normal instead of thinking about how WE could get back to normal. It was “me over we” and we continue to see that. It’s sad. And children are among those who will suffer the most.Report
Who could have predicted that electing a pig-ignorant malignant narcissist was a bad idea?Report
I want to say it is only America that is beset by a pandemic of stupidity, but other countries are suffering as well:
Thousands in Berlin protest coronavirus restrictions in ‘Freedom Day’ march as cases continue to rise
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/08/01/thousands-berlin-protest-coronavirus-restrictions-freedom-day-march-cases-continue-rise/?hpid=hp_world1-8-12_virusberlin-110pm-1%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans
I’m imagining a thousand years from now as archeologists sift through the rubble of our civilization, they will study the literature and histories, then shake their heads and exclaim, “This can’t be right! It must have been something else!”Report
Quarantines were always hard to maintain because people always hated getting normal life disrupted by years. When this disruption occurs across, society you need either a real apparent emergency like war or some real force to get people behind. There is very little appetite for a trooper enforced quarantine. Instead everybody hopes people obey the better angels of their nature.Report
I know.
But I keep thinking of that line from the Terminator, where the virus doesn’t feel pity or remorse, it doesn’t get tired, it can’t be bargained with, and it will not stop until it runs out of bodies to infect.Report
Quarantines were always hard to maintain
Where I live there was a solid 7-8 weeks where there weren’t cars on the road. The couple times I drove through downtown Boulder, the emptiness, the stillness, of the place was eerie. Just a ghost town. Then the Gov started relaxing restrictions, opening things up….
People here quarantined. I have no idea how much they complained about it.Report
Here’s the AARP reporting:
https://www.aarp.org/work/working-at-50-plus/info-2020/teachers-coronavirus-risk.html
Turns out the study was actually done by the Kaiser family Foundation:
https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/how-many-teachers-are-at-risk-of-serious-illness-if-infected-with-coronavirus/
And remember, low wage workers are mostly people of color in urban areas . . . .Report
What is this nonsense, ‘We have no problem as society’?
A lot people actually _do_ have a problem with it. Or at least how it has been done.
While people need to be able to continue to get supplies, stores have allowed a _lot_ of unnecessary risk to pander to asshat customers. For _months_. At lot of them _just now_ got their act together and made all customers wear masks.
And even that is too much contact to require of employees. There’s no reason that the stores that are _able_ to take online orders should not switch entirely to pick up and basically not allow customers in the store at all.
I understand not all stores will be able to do that, and also not everyone can purchase goods online so some exceptions might need to be made even in stores that can, but there’s no reason that shouldn’t be 95% of purchases in stores that can.Report
What is this nonsense, ‘We have no problem as society’?
A lot people actually _do_ have a problem with it. Or at least how it has been done.”
Yes, you are right, it is so much nonsense. So much nonsense that we have to make sure that the deli counter, the butcher counter, the cheese nook, the flower lady, and whatever other specialty counter the store has is fully manned and prepared to give us exactly what we want.
Such nonsense.Report
What are you even talking about? Your sarcasm has overridden your actual point.
There are lot of people, let’s call them group A, who are concerned about all the sacrificial workers we’ve required to keep working.
There are a bunch of assholes who don’t think anything should change and that ‘they should be able to go shopping’, let’s called those group B.
There are large corporations who are _not_ concerned about those workers (Because they never have been.), and thus have behaved in rather insane ways, like continuing to operate delis. Let’s call this group C. They have been, until recently, allowing group B to do whatever they want, despite the fact that group B is a _really_ small amount of the population.
This despite the fact that in many places, a lot of these large corporations _functionally have a oligopoly_ and thus group B functionally couldn’t boycott them. If Lowes and Home Depot both say ‘You have to wear a mask to come in’, WTH are the idiots going to do? Go somewhere else?
In fact, in the town I was in…the in-town grocery store is a Walmart. The second nearest…also a Walmart. Next up…a Kroger and Publix. I don’t know how far you’d have to drive to find a grocery store that _didn’t_ just announce ‘everyone had to wear mask’, but I would be very startled if it was less than an hour. (And who knows what their mask requirements are?)
And all those places _could have_ done that three months ago. They could have even gotten together and agreed to do that in advance if they were worry about customers defecting to each other…’collusion’ doesn’t cover safety standards. They could have said ‘Starting this day, we all will require masks’, and the fact they basically did announce it all at once makes me think they _did_ do that.
—
And now that we’ve clarified these are different groups of people, group A, the people who are concerned, group B, the Official Morons who yell FREEDUM, and group C, corporations that pandered to group B for way too long but have finally started changing policies, although not enough…what _is_ your point?
A _lot_ of us have indeed been concerned _this entire time_, about what sacrificial workers were being asked to do. The fact corporations were not concerned about their own workers doesn’t change that.Report
If we have a problem, as a society, with having people work at our grocery stores, then do you think we would spring for the value add positions? The florists, the butchers, the cheese mongers, the sandwich makers, all at bespoke counters, ready for our bidding? No, we would get the pre-package lunchmeat, the pre-shredded cheese, the pre-packaged meat. The sandwich triangles in the vending machine. We could switch back to the automat if we truly if we didn’t want any of that human contact.
No, we are totally cool with grocery workers, as a society. You as an individual might be concerned, but society couldn’t care less.Report
Watching the Republicans and many major corporations deal with Covid-19 is like being in the late stage Soviet Union. Everything is falling apart and the ideology is not working but the people in charge are really devoted to their ideology. They can’t bend course or be pragmatic. So they keep trying to power through Covid-19 and pretend it isn’t happening. This is despite all evidence that it is happening, with new infections, hospitalizations, and deaths having every day.Report
This is our Chernobyl.
“You did not see graphite on the roof because it wasn’t there!”Report
This is our Chernobyl.
“You did not see graphite on the roof because it wasn’t there!”Report
Just to be clear, we require essential workers to go to work, knowing full well that their lives are endangered and many will die as a result.
We do this because food is essential and people can’t go for months without it.Report
And yet, like teachers, we pay them abysmally. And deny them healthcare, and often prevent them from unionizing . . . .Report
Paying workers in the food industry more would raise food prices. Consumers would revolt at that.Report
has that happened in cities where the minimum wage has been raised? I’ll wait . . .Report
Paying workers in the food industry more would raise food prices. Consumers would revolt at that.
When the liberal/neoliberal distinction collapses.Report
Unlikely. Consumers also like to eat.Report
Remember, everyone. Flatten that curve. We don’t want to see any curve at all! Just a straight line steadily increasing until everyone’s infected! (I may have misunderstood that somewhere.)
You know, at some point, I feel like I’m gaslit by…society itself. People acting like this is over.
We…have more sick people than at any prior point in time, right? I’m crazy, right? That’s what’s actually happening? I’m not imagining that, right?
So, if we were…closed earlier, when we had…less sick people…why would we…not be closed now?Report
“So, if we were…closed earlier, when we had…less sick people…why would we…not be closed now?”
Because if we’d known in March that four months later this would still be going, then we wouldn’t have closed.Report
No honey, hopefully we wouldn’t have reopened the bars after Trump primal screamed “LIBERATE MICHIGAN”.
I mean I’m here at ground zero in Texas, and that’s exactly what happened. Trump screamed on Twitter to liberate various states, and Abbot listened. Despite not being close to where Trump’s own government guidelines indicated for reopening, Abbot did.
In fact, the day he did so was the day Harris County (you know, Houston, currently massively suffering?) was set to have a mask requirement go into effect. Abbot’s order that day explicitly superseded all local control, as the party of local government often does, in favor of a state-wide order.
Abbot, who had been previously ignoring the situation claiming a state wide order would be too broad, decided that day that no local area could have requirements more strict than the state as a whole — and then he rapidly moved to reopen everything over the next four weeks, not choosing to wait a sufficient time between phases to even see results (and that would be with adequate testing, which Texas doesn’t and never has had) — until of course the inevitable happened.
Now, of course, we’re all wearing masks and a Texan dies from COVID-19 roughly every seven minutes. And right now our currently indicted AG (he was indicted four years ago on corruption charges. The trial keeps strangely being delayed) is trying desperately to force schools open (over Abbot’s own objections, which says a lot about that) statewide.
Why? Because Donald Trump screams on Twitter and on TV about opening schools, and Ken Paxton — like Abbot and Patrick — just can’t quit that man.Report
Are you sure you aren’t a bot? Because this is 100% bot. There is nothing new here.Report
…so…if we known it was going to explode anyway, we would have made sure that explosion happened _sooner_?
Like I said, there’s a proportion of people who are in some sort of extreme weird denial that they caused an apocalypse by refusing to actually behave months ago when warned, and now we’re in a situation where they won’t even admit it’s happening now.
And I am _so_ glad other countries exist. Because, if they didn’t, I promise that current claim would be ‘We never could have done anything about this’.
Luckily, that’s totally disproven by almost every other country.Report
“if we known it was going to explode anyway, we would have made sure that explosion happened _sooner_?”
yes.
Like, you’re here telling us that we could have not had an explosion, and…we cannot not have an explosion. Everywhere that’s reopened has seen more cases. Everywhere. It does not matter what they did for social distancing, it does not matter which things open and when, it does not matter how long and how hard and how soon they locked down beforehand. Everywhere that opens has more cases. There is no escape, there is no option, there is no Smart Practice, there is no “well if only this country weren’t run by Trump-sucking RETARDS we’d be safe” version of this story. You’re gonna get it. Figure out how to deal with that.
I mean, you say “flatten the curve” and that’s great, and you’re right, but part of the deal there was that this was a Killer Death Virus, airborne Inverse Ebola, something where you feel fine and then you start coughing and five minutes you hack up a blood clot that’s a perfect cast of your bronchial tree. Like, it wasn’t supposed to be that you could be and stay asymptomatic for the entire course of the disease, this was sold as “you get it and you die”. And yeah, I was out there saying that too, but as things have gone on we see more and more people who just…have it? And more and more data coming in that the people who died from it are all of a type, and that this type is something we can identify, and maybe what needs to happen going forward is that this type of person is the one who gets locked down and stays in a safe place.
Like, you want to say ‘well the American economy isn’t set up for people to just Not Be Around for a while but be expected to return later,’ you’re not wrong about that, but that’s not how this fall is gonna go, this fall is gonna be “well we sent the kids back to school for two weeks and now they’ve all got the virus, CLOSE EVERYTHING DOWN AGAIN, don’t you dare tell me ‘no’ you idiot, you moron, you Republican freedom-addict, we NEED TO LOCK IT DOWN TIGHTER THAN BEFORE.”Report