Doug
I am getting the impression from afar (Australia) that the USA has essentially given up trying to limit the spread of the virus, and has decided that locking down is too expensive, and that a likely million deaths is just inevitable.
I hope my impression is wrong, but that is what it looks like from over here.
Am I wrong?
Cheers
Alec
It is only 1.3m Americans at 0.4% if ALL Americans are infected; but we know these things donāt infect 100%.
Our national leadership has given up because it is inconvenient. Our local leadership has not given up, but canāt really do the best job with the variance between regions and inability to coordinate due to the national vacuum.
This is an unfair statement.
Our national leadership is trying to ābalanceā between a number of issues including pandemic, economy, segregation protests, rioting, etc. I donāt envy those making these decisions!
Alec, I donāt think anybody in power is going to publicly go with an inevitable million deaths. It does seem like there is not the political will to lock things down enough for contact tracing to work. Personally, I think it would have had to be hard and fast, and on a national level, a la New Zealand, etc.
Once that ship had sailed, we were a long way from several things - a long way from unity, a long way from a vaccine or effective antiviral medicine, a long way from acceptance of what had to be done, or what would occur without sufficient action.
I think speculation about a vaccine by the end of the year is considerably optimistic. However, even if it happens, thatās still ten months, March through December, and many people were really resisting stay-at-home orders after only one month, and legions were by the time we got close to two.
Much of the U.S. didnāt experience nearly the early virus spread that the northeastern states (mostly (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts) did. Stay-at-home orders went into effect in most states, and restrictions were lifted in April and May, which has proved to be too early - hence the big and fast increases in cases weāre now seeing.
New Jersey currently has the highest per-capita death rate; if the whole U.S. were there, itād be ~570,000 deaths. While the death rates have dropped off a lot in those states that were severely affected first, itās not over and there are many people in the very-vulnerable groups that are as yet not infected. There are certainly things that can reduce the death rate - medical treatment reflecting increased learning about the virus all the time, virus attenuation through mutation, possible drugs/vaccine, etc.
Who knows what it will all boil down to, in the end?
I thought we were going to win the war? The leadership failed. We know this because of the difference between US and European infection rates. One place did well. The other did not. Quod erat demonstrandum
And this all falls on the leadership and not the compliance of the people they are trying to lead??
Since were still in the early stages and the end has not been reached, drawing a conclusion now is premature and irrelevant. IMO
It falls on the leadership because that has been a clear vacuum of crap. From insane statements that it will magically go away to a complete lack of centralized organization of our resource, the leadership has completely abdicatedāand that shows in our results. The early stages were March and April. We are in the thick of it here, and in places where they did address it, the threat is significantly less.
I visit my home country Italy every couple of years and I can assure you that obesity in Europe is rare and Europeans make the best food. Leadership is irrelevant. Americans eat food that I wouldnāt even feed to a dog.
You canāt deny infection rate decline, and that didnāt happen because of lack of obesity; it happened because of leadership and effort to control the virus.
I remember seeing overweight people and Iāve rarely seen people the size of Americans.
I think obesity is too easy a factor to āblameā. In Canada the majority of those who have died (85%) so far were elderly living in long term carehomes. The pandemic revealed how horrible the conditions were there worsened by the pandemic of course. I would guess that obesity was not the issue as some of the elderly were undernourished. They called in the military to try to get a handle on the situation.
In the US (and probably every where) it is a socio-racial issue. Poorer people who has to work and who live in crowded conditions are the one who gets the infection in larger numbers than more affluent people. They may also struggle with obesity since, as we know, fast convenient food is cheaper than ārealā food.
It is complicated situation and looking for one word explanations is obviously way too easy.
Obesity isnāt the ONLY factor. It is a factor in worse outcomes.
Itās not in the long run when we factor in medication and/or doctor visits and/or longer showers and/or gas to buy the food every day and/or TV subscription+electricity and/or other lifestyle factors that go along with obesity.
Poor people cannot afford doctor visits or medication very often. My point, however, is that that stats in the US may link obesity and deathsā¦ but that may just be a coincidence since poorer people are getting the virus and more of them are dying as well. Stats in Canada will likely not link obesity and death because of the reasons I outlined above. And in certain provinces we had a fairly high amount of death.
I am not saying I know the answers ā¦ but I just think one word conclusions like āleaderā or āfatā are not helpful. We have to look at where the virus is most deadly and look more carefully at what is happening in those places and it may vary from area to area and country to country.
Adding to say that this also may explain why reopening in Canada has been more successful than in the US. Our cases were in large case linked to the care homes but in the US they were linked to poorer nabourhoods and obviously opening up meant that more people were crowding into buses and trains and work places where the virus will spread more rapidly.
I looked at those maps and there is still massive obesity in Europe as well as the overweight people theyāre not mentioning. I maintain the word ārareā is the wrong word to use and makes people think Europeans are slim and healthy. Not true. Our prime minister has just suggested he suffered worse with covid because heās overweight.
If youāre wondering why your post was deleted it was due to blatantly politicized content, which this community has repeatedly asked members to refrain from.
Thatās because itās PART of the problem. The large part of the actual problem - of which obesity is by far the most visible part - is metabolic syndrome. It appears that this virus LOVES people with broken blood.
I am going to challenge the idea that ārealā food is more expensive than fast food. It isnāt. I work with really poor people (imagine a family of 5 or 6 living on farm worker wages). They eat meat (inexpensive cuts) mixed with beans or rice and vegetables to make it stretch. Someone makes tortillas, fruit is a dessert treat. You canāt feed a family of 6, even from a dollar menu, for less than a pot of beans.
Now, the argument can be made that this kind of food isnāt available everywhere, but stores will go where there is demand. Maybe not a big grocery chain, but there are a ton of small local markets around here with very good prices that are frequented by farmworker families.
I think some of you are taking this out of context. I believe @HeleneS was saying this as condescending satire and I understood the humor in it. I assumed it was just a given that everyone knew eating fast food all the time would cost more than cooking??? 