rgio wrote:
 
i would agree, the mass transit. there are about 1.5m people who go through penn and grand central station alone each day.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:
 
LOCKDOWN!

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:
 
Welcome to the fray Wyoming.   

March 17...NYTimes: 

Rhode Island was taking the temperature of out of state drivers crossing the border for a while.  NJ and Delaware shore communities have asked non-resident homeowners to stay away.

While I appreciate the logic of spending your time locked in a house located in a "nicer" place, seasonal towns don't have off-peak infrastructure in place for food, medicines, and other necessities.  Crazy times indeed.

If all could be done at once...

 KarmaKarma wrote:
 

 KarmaKarma wrote:


My guess is that both organizations actually have covered this matter extensively, but you just don't know how to search.  

Try focusing on Covid-19 and not your grudge against the Times and BloombergBusiness. 

 kcar wrote:
 
You should forward this info on to those lousy, incompetent, so-called journalists at the LA Times & Bloomberg Business.

 R_P wrote:
 

Wyoming's Teton County, with its overpopulation of billionaires, is exploding due to them all coming to their mountain retreats and bringing along whatever they got back in the city. 

“As far as Counsel is aware,” the motion declares, describing the conditions at the medium-security prison where Finnestad is being held, “hand sanitizer at FCI Sheridan is simply not available as it is contraband. Soap is not provided to inmates, but rather must be purchased. Strangely, a bar of soap is no longer going to appear on commissary alone, but instead must be purchased with a more expensive hygiene packet.”

 Steely_D wrote:
 


 
I would have thought the current situation is a perfect example of when it makes a lot of sense to have a functioning government, even for die-hard libertarians for whom the legitimacy of government is anyway gossamer thin. A whole lot of free individuals running around is just not going to cut it in this situation.  And when ignorant people get infected and come to infect me, their ignorance is no longer just their problem, but mine as well. We are in this together, whether we like it or not.

“We cannot afford to have people who are not even Floridians dumped into South Florida using up those valuable resources,” DeSantis told Fox News on Monday.

 Steely_D wrote:
 
Like  Lombardy in fact.

 kcar wrote:
 
  gotta admit, I greatly admire your thoroughness.

 sirdroseph wrote:
 

That's what libertarians are saying, but it ignores that most of the nation isn't well educated in science, epidemiology, public health, psychology, economics, and a whole lot of other things that come in to play here. In fact this is EXACTLY the time for government leaders to listen to those who have made studies of these topics their life's work. Blaming it on each person individually is thinking that the person who never went to college has the same resources as Elon Musk. Our culture is fantastically heterogenous. The unifying thing in a situation like this is that someone needs to be educated, directing the resources for the populace, and that didn't happen here.

Trump is, no matter how someone feels, in charge. Responsible. Accountable. It doesn't matter if I like him. He still has work he's responsible to do and he screwed the pooch on this one.

And FOXNews and Hannity and the rest are accomplices in that they downplayed things - against the rational educated warnings by the experts that they should've been consulting, and you heard elsewhere. So thinking that "people" can make their own decisions presupposes their level of education, their level of understanding, and the veracity of their information sources.

I suppose someone can say "that's their problem" but I can't be that way.

 Steely_D wrote:
 
Subways / mass transit in NY (and NJ / CT - you can draw concentric circles around NYC and see the impact). vs. cars in LA.  WA was a specific carrier to a retirement home for starters.

 KarmaKarma wrote:
 

And here I thought you were paid to be here. Apparently you aren't paid to read or pay attention because there have been MULTIPLE posts in this thread and others with links to news articles. 

I will cut your meat for you just this once.  Next time, try reading pieces from serious news organizations and staying informed. Learn how to Google, too. 



U.S. intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic




Trump administration ignored pandemic warning from White House economists: report


https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/contrary-to-trumps-claim-a-pandemic-was-widely-expected-at-some-point/

Before Trump’s inauguration, a warning: ‘The worst influenza pandemic since 1918’

Obama officials walked Trump aides through global pandemic exercise in 2017: report

The piece quoted below that shows we were warned about a pandemic for YEARS before Trump even took office. 

We Were Warned

When the inevitable inquiry into the government's response to COVID-19 happens, it will conclude that signs of a coming crisis were everywhere.

We were warned in 2012, when the Rand Corporation surveyed the international threats arrayed against the United States and concluded that only pandemics posed an existential danger, in that they were “capable of destroying America’s way of life.”

We were warned in 2015, when Ezra Klein of Vox, after speaking with Bill Gates about his algorithmic model for how a new strain of flu could spread rapidly in today’s globalized world, wrote that “a pandemic disease is the most predictable catastrophe in the history of the human race, if only because it has happened to the human race so many, many times before.” If there was anything humanity could be certain that it needed to prepare for to prevent the deaths of a lot of people in little time, it was this.

We were warned in 2017, a week before inauguration day, when Lisa Monaco, Barack Obama’s outgoing homeland-security adviser, gathered with Donald Trump’s incoming national-security officials and conducted an exercise modeled on the administration’s experiences with outbreaks of swine flu, Ebola, and Zika. The simulation explored how the U.S. government should respond to a flu pandemic that halts international travel, upends global supply chains, tanks the stock market, and burdens health-care systems—all with a vaccine many months from materializing. “The nightmare scenario for us, and frankly to any public-health expert that you would talk to, has always been a new strain of flu or a respiratory illness because of how much easier it is to spread” relative to other pandemic diseases that aren’t airborne, Monaco told me.

We were warned in 2018, on the 100th anniversary of the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed 50 to 100 million people around the world. My colleague Ed Yong served notice that the “next plague” was coming, with influenza the most dangerous possibility, even as the United States succumbed to “forgetfulness and shortsightedness.” Luciana Borio, then the director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council, told a symposium that “the threat of pandemic flu is our number-one health security concern.” Serving under a president who’d come to office on the pledge to wall off the United States, she noted that such a threat could not “be stopped at the border.” The very next day, news broke that National Security Adviser John Bolton had shuttered the NSC’s unit for preparing and responding to pandemics, of which Borio was a part. The White House official in charge of spearheading such a response to infectious threats departed as well and was not replaced.

Read: A glimpse of the coronavirus’s possible legacy

We were warned in 2018 and 2019, when the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security gathered public-health experts, business leaders, and U.S. government officials for simulations of the devastating humanitarian, political, social, and economic consequences of fictional novel coronaviruses that left tens of millions dead around the world. Participants exited the events thinking, “‘Oh my god, we really need to get working on this,’” Eric Toner, who helped run the exercises, told me. Two months after the second simulation, a novel coronavirus (albeit with what appears to be a substantially lower lethality rate than the fictional viruses in the scenarios at Johns Hopkins) emerged in China.

We were warned in 2019 of the grave hazards of a new influenza pandemic by the U.S. intelligence community in its annual “worldwide threat assessment.” They had also cautioned us in 2018. And in 2017. And in 2016. And in 2015. And in 2014. And in 2013, when intelligence officials pleaded, “This is not a hypothetical threat. History is replete with examples of pathogens sweeping populations that lack immunity, causing political and economic upheaval.” (The 2020 worldwide threat assessment, which reportedly yet again flagged America’s vulnerability to a flu pandemic, has been postponed without explanation.)

When the National Commission on the COVID-19 response materializes, it will differ from the 9/11 Commission in that it will conclude that “the system was blinking red” not just in the inner sanctum of the U.S. intelligence community but out in the open, as well. For years. Within government and outside government. And that, despite all that, the U.S. government was not sufficiently prepared when the boogeyman, in this case the virus SARS-CoV-2, finally came calling. President Trump has referred to the coronavirus outbreak as “an unforeseen problem,” as “something that nobody expected,” and as a crisis that “came out of nowhere.” It is demonstrably none of the above.

...

Funding for pandemic preparedness has long lagged behind other homeland-security priorities. The U.S. government, for example, spends at least $100 billion a year on counterterrorism efforts versus $1 billion on pandemic and emerging-infectious-disease programs, according to one calculation in 2016. This despite the fact that the new coronavirus threatens to kill vastly more Americans than terrorism ever has.

And the Trump administration has gone further—not only underfunding these efforts but also proposing steep spending cuts year after year to institutions, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that are tasked with handling outbreaks. Congress has resisted these efforts in the bills Trump has ultimately signed, but the president’s requests have nevertheless spoken to his priorities. His budget proposal for fiscal year 2021, released in February when the coronavirus outbreak had already reached the United States, called for the CDC’s overall funding to be slashed by hundreds of millions of dollars. The administration did suggest more resources for certain subsets of the CDC’s work relevant to the current crisis. Each of those increases, however, is less than the Trump administration devoted in its 2021 budget proposal to counter Chinese and Russian propaganda and disinformation, and a small fraction of the additional $459 million the administration wished to pour into offensive hypersonic weapons. (But what’s $459 million when you’re spending billions on them already?)

Read: How you should get food during the pandemic

The Trump administration has also downplayed global health threats through structural changes within the White House’s national-security architecture. It downgraded the role of homeland security adviser so that it didn’t report directly to the president after Monaco’s successor, Tom Bossert, was dismissed in 2018. (Bossert was an advocate of developing a biodefense strategy for addressing biological attacks and pandemic diseases like influenza.) That same year, it closed a pandemic-response unit that the Obama administration had created after the Ebola outbreak, folding some of the remnants into other NSC directorates. Tim Morrison, who led the resulting counterproliferation and biodefense office before leaving the administration in 2019, has argued that the shake-up was an effort to reduce “bloat” at the NSC. But the consequences were serious: When the novel coronavirus first broke out, there were no senior administration officials focused solely on combatting such threats and coordinating global health security policy across agencies.

Kaiser Health News: Was The Novel Coronavirus Really Sneaky In Its Spread To The U.S.? Experts Say No.
“…Public health researchers have warned for years about the threat of a pandemic. And members of the Trump administration have been sounding the alarm for months now — even while, just earlier this month, Trump was still comparing the virus’s severity to the flu, and arguing that it ‘will go away’ if people ‘stay calm.’ We contacted the White House, which declined to comment on the record. Meanwhile, independent experts told us this claim is deeply misleading…” (Luthra, 3/19).

New York Times: Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded
“…The simulation’s sobering results — contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported — drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed. … Many of the potentially deadly consequences of a failure to address the shortcomings are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the country. And it was hardly the first warning for the nation’s leaders. Three times over the past four years the U.S. government, across two administrations, had grappled in depth with what a pandemic would look like, identifying likely shortcomings and in some cases recommending specific action…” (Sanger et al., 3/19).

just curious if anyone has a link handy to india or brazil and their data

i've been looking at jh csse and it's pretty good overall

but it seems like a few countries are just not too good at reporting

thanks in advance

 sirdroseph wrote:

The Chinese government obviously made a mostly foolish choice to hide it. Instead they could've arranged a press conference with Defence Minister Wei Fenghe and announce that "we don't do body counts." Problem solved.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:
 
"He chose to ignore increasingly shrill warnings for 3 years."

Got link?  Because obviously the Trump-loving LA Times and sycophant Bloomberg News ignored this info.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:
 

I think you both have good points. There has to be responsible and planned action at the personal and governmental level. People have to re-order their lives in ways that reduce the chance of catching Covid-19. Governments have to dispense advice on how to avoid Covid-19, give our healthcare systems the best chance of fighting the virus, and find ways to keep people from starvation, eviction, etc. 

You can't blame the Trump administration entirely for this. The Obama administration apparently felt lucky that it had contained an Ebola outbreak in the US and ran a scenario exercise to determine what kind of problems the country could face if a pandemic hit. A lot of the problems that we're seeing today—confusion, lack of government coordination at the federal and state levels, insufficient medical supplies, facilities, and personnel numbers—all showed up. It's not as if Trump tore down an effective and efficient federal organization for handling a pandemic.

However, the Obama administration DID warn the incoming Trump administration—including Chief of Staff John Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson—about the results of that scenario exercise and the federal government's lack of readiness to deal with a pandemic. Trump's administration ran its own exercise—Crimson Contagion—I think it was in 2017 and found the same problems. But the current administration didn't do much AFAICT to address the problems. 

The American people need and deserve more information, action and leadership from the federal and state governments. The federal government desperately needs a plan to ramp up production of medical supplies and to get money to people thrown out of work. The feds also need to tell idiots like the Govs. of FL, MS and apparently MT to lock their states down. Governor DeSantis of FL finally got his head out of his butt and issued a stay-at-home order today after publicly and repeatedly looking to the White House for guidance. 

Sirdroseph is right that we all need to take personal responsibility. But that alone isn't going to contain Covid-19 or save the economy. 

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
 
I am continuously amazed at the amount of energy spent looking for scapegoats in the middle of the fight.  In hindsight, there are surely things prior administrations could have done better, but you can't spend 3 years eliminating capability, ignoring science, and removing everyone who might challenge decision making...only to blame Obama and Impeachment for ignoring the gathering storm. and then having no ability to respond. 

In 2 weeks, if Floridians are dropping like flies, It'll be interesting to watch Trump and DeSantis attempt to avoid responsibility.  Like Liberty University, those who blindly followed POTUS from the beginning will now be called to justify their actions.  The President has moved on...and isn't going to look over his shoulder to see who needs help after being his front line support.