Yet another Southern state "reopening" even though cases are still rising

[Maria D]

@gm89uk , thank you for being in this world to help others. I know I could never do this kind of work and I am deeply grateful to those who are able and willing. I am so sorry for your losses.

 

[Karl_K]

@gm89uk sorry for your loses and prayers are outgoing for you and your friends/loved ones.

 

[yennyfire]

@gm89uk I’m so sorry for your losses and thank you for your continued efforts to help people who are fighting Covid.

 

[Arcadian]

I want to leave this here because its from a Dr in NY.
I think most are in agreement that if we open up (or as we open up) precautions need to be taken.
This stuff is not the regular ol plain jane flu considering the damage it did early on, how it exponentially exploded, and lot the aftermath. in particular its very ugly.

And I can even tell you in parts of FL, they might have had 2-5 cases and nothing else, but where I am lots of dead people in all age ranges.

Serious care needs to be taken in opening up. And no, I'm not in total agreement with how our state is opening (the worst counties are going to remain closed for some time, one of which is mine,t he rest of the state will open slowly), I can agree it does NEED to open as long as the checks and balances are there.

I’ve worked the coronavirus front line — and I say it’s time to start opening up

I’m an emergency physician at St. Barnabas Hospital in The Bronx. I have been in the ER every day these last few weeks, either supervising or providing direct care. I contracted a COVID-19 infectio…

nypost.com

 

[telephone89]

Not a southern state, but a bunch of canadian provinces have also released their plans for reopening, some starting Monday. Quebec was one of the first to announce, but they have the majority of cases in all provinces! They have over 50% of all cases in Canada (in 1 province) and 58% of all deaths. And they want to be the first to re-open. I'm astounded at how they think this is appropriate.

 

[soxfan]

Did we run out of viagra too?

https://twitter.com/x/status/1255922426120146947

 

[Demon]

Did we run out of viagra too?

https://twitter.com/x/status/1255922426120146947

I saw an earlier video of that and I only noticed 2 people wearing masks. Michigan had almost 1,000 new cases yesterday. I wonder what it will be in a couple of weeks.

 

[TechieTechie]

Yes. I have to say that I was shocked by those results.

If we go full on contract tracing route, I am leaving my phone at home for all errands and withdrawing a huge hoarde of cash and paying for cash for retail purchases. I am all for keeping safe but I am not for contract tracing. To me, that is a violation of 4th amendment rights.

But, what is happening in MI is absolutely horrific. Both the infection rate and the run on the statehouse.

It's long, but I think it's important for Americans to read a perspective outside the American media political spin. Here is what Ireland’s most respected mainstream political writes about the US. Normally I would post a link, but this Irish Times article is behind a paywall. It makes me want to cry, because deep down, I know he is speaking the truth.

Irish Times
April 25, 2020
By Fintan O’Toole

THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.
As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”

It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.
The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.

If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated. Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?

It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.

Abject surrender

What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.

Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.
In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”

This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the Coronavirus. It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.

Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.
The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.

Fertile ground

But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder. And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.

That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.

And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.

Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

 

[Demon]

And yet another day for almost 1,000 new cases for Michigan and Georgia had just over 1,000.

 

[1ofakind]

Increase in cases may simply be a function of increased testing. Hospitalizations are a better indicator how they are really doing.

 

[Demon]

I'm just looking for amount of increases in infections in a couple of weeks, after the protests in Michigan and the re-opening of Georgia.

 

[elizat]

Florida here. All our offices are opening apart from the three South Florida counties not part of phase 1. It is going back to business as usual as of Monday, other than they are wanting people not to congregate or eat in a communal kitchen basically. I don't know what I think about that.

 

[1ofakind]

I'm just looking for amount of increases in infections in a couple of weeks, after the protests in Michigan and the re-opening of Georgia.

And I'm just pointing out that even if cases increase while testing increases it won't be much of an indicator given how many mild or asymptomatic cases they suspect are out there. It's not the most important number to watch as a sign of how the reopening is going. It could be the least important.

 

[Demon]

And I'm just pointing out that even if cases increase while testing increases it won't be much of an indicator given how many mild or asymptomatic cases they suspect are out there. It's not the most important number to watch as a sign of how the reopening is going. It could be the least important.

Hard to know what's going to be most useful, as testing is improving but still not covering anyone that isn't symptomatic. There's still going to be many people who don't know they have it that are passing it on, and people with mild cases aren't getting tested as far I know. Not in CO anyway, unless you are referred for a test.

 

[nala]

Hard to know what's going to be most useful, as testing is improving but still not covering anyone that isn't symptomatic. There's still going to be many people who don't know they have it that are passing it on, and people with mild cases aren't getting tested as far I know. Not in CO anyway, unless you are referred for a test.

This is why I think contact tracing will be the most useful tool in getting back to normal. Hopefully we can all agree on an acceptable ground before we rush back to normal and forget that contact tracing was one of the conditions outlined by our government before opening up again.

 

[1ofakind]

I don't know how the testing is in those states but we live in a smaller town in a hard hit state and we can get tested. I don't see the point if I don't have symptoms but it's available here without a referral.

 

[OboeGal]

Because we were talking about masks

This is awesome!

 

[Demon]

I don't know how the testing is in those states but we live in a smaller town in a hard hit state and we can get tested. I don't see the point if I don't have symptoms but it's available here without a referral.

Because you can be a carrier and pass it on to others.

 

[1ofakind]

Because you can be a carrier and pass it on to others.

That's why I wear a mask in public, practice social distancing and wash my hands.
I could test negative today only because I have too low a viral load to detect. Or I could really be negative today but contract it tomorrow. We all can't get tested every day just to see if we are asymptomatic carriers.

 

[Demon]

Lol, no one said everyday. Random testing, and anyone who wants to get tested because they don't feel well, but not sick enough to be referred, or anyone who thinks they may have been exposed. But like @nala said - contact tracing.

 

[OboeGal]

If we go full on contract tracing route, I am leaving my phone at home for all errands and withdrawing a huge hoarde of cash and paying for cash for retail purchases. I am all for keeping safe but I am not for contract tracing. To me, that is a violation of 4th amendment rights.

But, what is happening in MI is absolutely horrific. Both the infection rate and the run on the statehouse.

It's long, but I think it's important for Americans to read a perspective outside the American media political spin. Here is what Ireland’s most respected mainstream political writes about the US. Normally I would post a link, but this Irish Times article is behind a paywall. It makes me want to cry, because deep down, I know he is speaking the truth.

Irish Times
April 25, 2020
By Fintan O’Toole

THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.
As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”

It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.
The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.

If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated. Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?

It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.

Abject surrender

What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.

Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.
In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”

This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the Coronavirus. It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.

Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.
The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.

Fertile ground

But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder. And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.

That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.

And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.

Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

Thank you for posting this. This hits the nail on the head.

 

[1ofakind]

Lol, no one said everyday. Random testing, and anyone who wants to get tested because they don't feel well, but not sick enough to be referred, or anyone who thinks they may have been exposed. But like #nala said - contact tracing.

Sorry I must have misunderstood and certainly didn't mean to be argumentative. Testing is available to anyone here, with no referral or even symptoms. But given a negative test isn't an all clear sign I would still have to everything I'm already doing (mask, distancing etc.). If there were a study/survey in our area it would make more sense and I would likely participate. If I were feeling unwell I would also go for a test. Outside of those circumstances I don't think it makes much sense to randomly test myself just to see.

 

[Demon]

Sorry I must have misunderstood and certainly didn't mean to be argumentative. Testing is available to anyone here, with no referral. But given a negative test isn't an all clear sign I would still have to everything I'm already doing (mask, distancing etc.). I don't see the point of using up a test by random testing myself to see if I happen to have it and be asymptomatic. If they were doing a study/survey in our area it would make more sense and I would likely participate.

No sorry needed. Hard to read intent online. And I get it - no one wants or should go every week if they don't have symptoms. That's why I was thinking set it up for random tests for those who just want to be sure they aren't taking it home to their families even though they don't feel sick, because that's who's really at risk with carriers - the people we aren't wearing masks around. It's great that you can get tested just because you want to where you live, but in the Denver metro area, you need to have a referral. They're starting to give the antibody tests to anyone who wants it, but it's only in one central location right now, and we're a big spread out city. I'd like to have the antibody test done, but I'm not even sure if they're still getting false positives from the tests....

 

[1ofakind]

They only recently opened up the testing and it freaked me out because I was looking at our county stats jump from15 test outstanding to suddenly 200!!! My first thought was that they were tracing cases and we might have a lot of community spread but no, just some people wanted to get tested and now they could. The first big batch came back all negative from those. I do not know if we can get the antibody test here yet and like you I don't know about the accuracy.

 

[Demon]

It's a mess for sure. Should I get tested? Can I get tested? If I do is the test right? Might as well flip a coin right now unless you feel sick.

 

[Arcadian]

Florida here. All our offices are opening apart from the three South Florida counties not part of phase 1. It is going back to business as usual as of Monday, other than they are wanting people not to congregate or eat in a communal kitchen basically. I don't know what I think about that.

They're freaking crazy but hey, what do I know? PBC Broward and Dade are going to be in lockdown and from what I heard, they will take PBC week to week to see if its worth even partial open. Dade and Broward are pretty bad still, and that might be June.

We are allowed some parks at least, which I think is not a bad idea as many snowbirds have left.

The Keys are country residents only though the month of May. They are opening some of their restaurants.

 

[missy]

Another opinion piece.

I will not die of stupid | Column

I’ll come out only after experts tell me it’s safe, writes Leonard Pitts.

tampabay.com

 

[nala]

Well, So Cal is not a Southern state, but the beach cities near me put up quite the protests. In San Clemente, a restaurant bar opened for sit-down service and so did a fashion store.

Some Orange County restaurants and shops reopen despite statewide orders

Nomads Canteen in San Clemente leads call for businesses to open back up.

www.ocregister.com

and this

Modoc becomes first California county to reopen despite governor's stay-at-home order

Businesses, schools, restaurants, public transit operations and other entities were permitted to reopen in northern California's Modoc County on May 1. Two additional counties will follow on Monday.

www.newsweek.com

 

[MRBXXXFVVS1]

At the end of the day, what matters most is your personal actions and what you can control. The potential heart and brain damage (in addition to lung issues) is unknown, and so is the re-infection rate.

I'm going to stay at home until there's a vaccine and/or herd immunity for the benefit of my family and others. It's not fun as we love to travel, explore, try new restaurants, etc. but health is the most important, something you can't get more of, and I feel fortunate I have a choice.

With the exception of school, work, and essential needs (groceries and healthcare), most people have a choice.

I have left the house 5 times in 2 months. To go to the grocery store once (have fully transitioned to grocery delivery and hopefully can continue to do so), doctor twice, and went on 2 walks (if that even counts). It's still just an extended temporary sacrifice I'm making for long term benefit.

 

[AGBF]

Increase in cases may simply be a function of increased testing. Hospitalizations are a better indicator how they are really doing.

What about the huge increase in deaths? The number keeps climbing and climbing.