, on the protests, we are encouraging protesters to get tested, but so far we haven’t seen a spike, probably because the protests were outdoors and almost universally masked. The degree to which masks work is becoming clearer as time goes by, but it’s looking like they work surprisingly well — especially outside, especially if everyone wears one. That’s what’s so toxic about politicization of masks. Here, we are at 100% masking indoors at grocery stores and other essential businesses, enforced by store owners and, really, by social convention.
I’m sure they’ll stand another year.
Q: How do you define gross stupidity?
There is no handbook on how best to deal with this pandemic and all we can do is figure it out as we get new data. Over the past 24 hours I came across two things that gave me hope.
The first is from Kevin Drum, and is so counterintuitive I’m almost reluctant to share it. It seems that three separate studies have shown that there has been no substantial benefit to shutting down schools. It’s early days, etc, etc and even if it holds up it doesn’t necessarily mean there is a positive effect of having kids in school but may be just that the negatives of school equals the negatives of kids at home, but it’s at least a sign of hope.
Getting infected on purpose only works with things that are either minor inconveniences or diseases you really need to get young because they get progressively more fatal as you age. The usual example is chicken pox: have a party, get all the kids sick and move on with life. Very few stop to think about WHY that’s a tradition in the first place. Chicken pox before the vaccine was something you wanted to deal with as soon as possible and in the most expedient manner available. Get all the kids in the neighborhood sick and you can split the child care duties by dumping them all in the same room. Poxed kids don’t need intensive care so as long as someone’s stopping them from scratching, anyone can be caretaker. Since most children wouldn’t need to be hospitalized over it but an adult might, it was better to have restless children picking at scabs then fevered adults with seizures.
COVID’s issues don’t work under that rubric. You’re likely to end up needing medical care or being hospitalized if you get anything other then a “mild” case. Getting everyone sick at once can easily overwhelms the caretakers and specialized training may be required. Getting it young seems to be more dangerous then we thought as Kawasaki Syndrome is now a concern. It’s simply a different beast: people’s limited medical knowledge and “everything a nail if you only have a hammer” attitude literally kills in this case. It makes ZERO sense to intentionally infect yourself with a new pathogen we don’t fully understand that can have health implications years from now. 

If any vaccine moves on to a human challenge phase (deliberately exposing vaccinated subjects to the virus in order to measure the effectiveness), the volunteers will be true heroes. Those trying to get infected to get immunity after getting the disease, are true morons.
To add, there is also a significant chance that Covid 19 will leave some survivors with long term after affects that may become increasingly debilitating over time.
More should be made of this.
Though the salient point is that most people living paycheck to paycheck can’t go even a couple of weeks without a job, it should be sobering that a time in history of such abundance in this country, at the peak of an economic trend that was the strongest in the history of strong economies to hear POTUS tell it, we have a situation when an epic, yet inevitable, event such as a pandemic so quickly forces people to choose between being safe and being solvent.
In our little corner of the world here in Cowlitz County, Washington, we went from about 77 total cases to 92 and from 10 active cases to 25 over the course of a weekend. With a population of ~105,000, we’re still well under a 1% infection rate, but the spike came during the second week of phase 2 reopening and the first week where most everybody who could open actually did. Not good news–and the newspaper reports that virtually no one was wearing masks at the high school graduation celebration attended by 25o some seniors and who knows how many parents and grandparents. Laissez les bon temps roullez.
Somehow I never noted that you had health issues separate and apart from Covid. Good thoughts don’t really do anything, but you have mine for what they’re worth.
My wife and I are very conscious that we have a privileged position in dealing with this. We’re both healthy, we both work from home, and we have a nice house with a lot of outdoor space. Plus she’s still got a fair bit of OCD, so we are all over the hand-washing thing. My fingers are half an inch shorter just from washing.
Ah, you’re no nuttier than any of the rest of us.
In 2008 I was diagnosed with Stage IV malignant melanoma with both brain and lung mets. Even though the median survival rate is 11 months, I’ve hung on for 12 years*. My health has been real bad at times and I have been close to death but pulled back some how. Around five years ago my condition stabilized. Until I was hospitalized with pulmonary edema back in March, I hadn’t been overnight in a hospital since 2015. The pulmonary edema, something that’s recurred with me due to the lung mets I have, was what probably made you think I have had Covid 19. Thank God I don’t come down with that, because it would probably kill me.
My primary and oncologist are advising their stage IV patients to stay home. I’ve taken it seriously. Dear wife does the shopping not me. She’s overshopped. Around a week ago, I counted how many rolls of toilet paper we have. Would you believe 155?
Right now I’m working on two separate ebooks. One is a full blown novel and the other is a short story collection.
*- 12 isn’t a record for Stage IV Malignant melanoma. Kimberly Wheeler, who I met a long time ago, was diagnosed in 1976 and lived till 2003. My oncologist says there is a Stage IV patient who’s still around 16 years later.
This isn’t a prediction, more like a thought experiment.
It looks like Trump is moving the Republican convention, or at least the big night, the one where he takes the stage, out of North Carolina and into Jacksonville, FL.
Florida is seeing an extremely steep rise in number of cases. While there is some possibility the rise in cases is due to increased testing, this seems unlikely in Florida. Although it is a battleground state, it’s current government is extremely Trumpian and seems to have no plan whatsoever to meet the C19 crisis, so standing up a testing regime would be completely out of character, and I haven’t seen any news articles about such a regime.
By the time August rolls around Florida hospitals could be overflowing, with refrigerated tractor trailers standing in for mortuaries as happened in NYC. The Republicans may be willing to go forward (because, Republicans), but I don’t think Trump will. He has rolled the dice on the virus magically disappearing in the summer and the death rate continuing to decline.  When things are looking bad he will not want to stand up in front of tens of thousands of people screaming coronavirus into the air. What will he do?
For that, it’s instructive to look at his various fiascos early in his career, when people he looked up to actually took him seriously and his failure was viscerally humiliating. The casinos, the airline, the football league – what did he do when it was obvious they were failing, and specifically failing because of his personal decisions, the ones he had bragged proved he was a genius? If my memory serves, in each of them he simply disappeared. Once the court appearances were over he stopped going out in public, stopped trying to get press attention, and simply waited for it to blow over.
So this thought experiment ends like this: sometime in the first half of August, with the convention shaping up to be a disaster and dangerous to his own personal safety, Trump will announce a health problem. He will say that due to that health problem he cannot run for his second term. The Republicans will be thrown into confusion but at least some of them will believe it gives them their only chance to stand up a candidate that can avert catastrophe in the Senate. Trump will remain on the sidelines, and once the election is over will disappear until January at least.
Trump admit a health problem? Never. That would be admitting a weakness. And we all know Trump has no weaknesses, mentally or physically. Why, he’s the healthiest man ever to occupy the office of the president.
@MarkedMan: I don’t see it, because Trump will face a very unpleasant future unless he wins a second term. Investigations galore, both politically and personally. I think he has a couple lawsuits against him personally (one is definitely a defamation suit by one of the women who accuses him of molesting her). Then we have to look at the Trump Organization which is leveraged to the hilt. Once he’s not president maybe the few banks who will lend to him won’t be quite so friendly. And the New York can start looking at his business practices. I think that Donald will find his life as an ex-president won’t be so much fun.
We need to consider this a bad news-good