Great! Lets review your sources. It'll take me a while to get through all of these, but I'll get to them all. Please in the future take a few minutes to read your own sources though. On a few of these so far, the studies that are being cited directly state the opposite of your argument.

I had this point to make in quite a few responses to your sources, so I'm going to move it here rather than address the same thing over and over again. People are trying to compare the flu to Covid just because its a familiar virus and familiarity is comforting. There are significant differences though that make the comparison between Covid and the Flu useless. Flu has an effective treatment and vaccine, so those that are in a higher risk category that don't want to risk expose can choose a flu shot. There isn't the same case with Covid. The reproduction number, fatality and hospitalization rates are substantially different, as is the length and intensity of treatment required.  


Regarding the predictions on Georgia's early reopening, while its still too early to tell exactly how that would go, this isn't really a great sign. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/18/only-america-is-sunday-day-after-thursday/

If it tries to paywall you, heres the important part.


Theres a few interesting parts in your article about how South Korea, did well while the hardest hit states are the ones with the strictest policies. Would it not make more sense to put it the other way around where the states hit the hardest have had to put the strictest measures in place? South Korea dealt with MERS a few years ago, so as soon as they said, hey guys its time to do this again, action was swift and efficient. They had much more efficient shorter term lockdowns because they started before the virus had much traction, and the people all followed them strictly. Italy is a great example for a country that was blindsided by Covid. They had police enforcing that people stay inside, but that was after the point that their hospitals were full, and the fatality rates were 2x higher than ours. They had unchecked covid19 at little fault of their own, and then had to battle it down with very strict measures. We've been sort of half assing it from the beginning, but at least we didn't hit the same rate of transmission Italy did. We end up with a sliding scale where strict measures stay in place for a short amount of time, or lax measures stay in place longer. IE China's crazy forced rounding up of infected people dealt with the problem quick but at substantial cost to civil liberties, somewhat strict for a short period of time (Northern Europe) where people were asked to not go to the grocery store more than once per week, road closures, and really stay away from everyone, or the US where it took us a while before the measures in place were more than just a recommendation. Every time people didn't take the recommendations seriously and got infected, we bumped out the closures longer while we tried to get it under control.  



This is an absolutely valid point. People aren't getting routine vaccinations and research is now focused on covid. In addition, domestic violence and child abuse cases are up. Though I don't have the data available to me to make some sort of equivalency between each person that misses a routine vaccine because nonessential doctors visits are canceled, something to consider is that the damage that Covid has caused so far is already factoring in the measures taken. There were predictions made based on the reproduction rate, the specific conditions for how Covid would spread, and fatality rates as well as long term damage. Medical professionals predicted how much damage Covid would do in different circumstances using the same models we predict the global flu counts and end up fractions of a % off when all said and done.


This is 100% not sarcastic. Why are people under the impression that the jobs go away and never come back? If you need 20 people to staff a hotel under normal situations, but then they lose their jobs because no one is traveling and the lockdowns are going on, would there not be lodging demand in however many months when things are free to resume as normal? In 1968 the economy took a 20% hit from a bad flu season. Everything I can find shows an economic downturn and then uptick after the vaccine became available 4 months later. While I understand there is the possibility for businesses to go under completely and not be able to return, if there is population and demand for goods/services in a location why would that demand go away when things resume? In my case and in my state anyway, my business expenses have been frozen. They'll have to be repaid, but repayment will begin after the emergency orders are lifted. On the contrary, I'd be in worse shape if the restrictions were lifted now, and had to pay expenses but sales were reduced because people chose to stay home.

The lockdown orders give legal protections to businesses that could otherwise be harassed by creditors or forced into bankruptcy just from people's choice to stay home. They also give legal protections to employees that could be forced into unemployment because their employer didn't value health guidelines if they were guidelines instead of orders.


Again, I agree with the sentiment, but you may want to read the study itself its referencing. Your link directs you to bloomberg, which directs you to wellbeingtrust.org which seems reliable enough, but its not their study. That then directs you to an article published in the JAMA Psychiatry journal which has not been peer reviewed yet. It is well reasoned and thought out, but its not calling itself a study, its a respectable opinion piece. Anyway, even if inclined to treat it as fact, as I will because even if not 100% accurate, it appears to have credible reason behind each of its claims, there are a few parts I imagine we'd both disagree with. It blames the increased sale of firearms during Covid as a major contributor to the increase suicides expected to see over the next 10 years. There is mention of the role isolation and economic stress plays, but its also factoring in the stress and death from the illness itself. I'm not dismissing this point, but heres an important part.



https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2764584


Yup, NYC may lose 900,000 jobs. Compared to how many otherwise?

To be abundantly optimistic, lets use New York state's statistics instead of New York City's. *Will return running the numbers for you*





So heres one I'm fairly well versed with that doesn't require hunting for data. I'm happy to go find official sources to rehash what I'm writing. There is no food shortage and the supply chain isn't broken per say. About half of food supplies are distributed to vendors like grocery stores, and half are distributed to restaurants. The transportation roles still exist, and the food exists, but they don't have contracts with grocery stores to deliver food, despite the food demand shifting from restaurant to grocery stores. Demand for certain foods is a little screwy, like potatoes which are served as french fries at restaurants are not proportionately being eaten by consumers that wouldn't make french fries themselves at home. Its a change, but not inherently long lasting or problematic. 






Overstating of the threat:











Corruption and power driving motives:


























Incompetence of government and experts:










[/quote]

Unemployment benefits come from money withheld from an individual's paycheck. About 6% of your paycheck is taken and withheld by your employer to pay for your unemployment benefits in case you need them. Its not the country or anyone else paying for it besides the individual. Same concept as taking a % of your paycheck and putting it on top of a jar above the fridge, except its forced and possibly invested to earn them money. Same deal as social security if you are of retirement age.

https://eligibility.com/unemployment/where-do-unemployment-benefit-funds-come-from

No, my second point was actually real, you communist puppet. You are allowed to make outlandish claims without any proof other than that its a possibility, so I'm just mirroring that sentiment. IE this is an intentional economic/power play. Is it not equally as likely that this is an intentional economic/power play but perpetrated by another government rather than our own? I just wanted you to see how joyous it is when all of the proof in the world means nothing in the face of some random conspiracy theory, and everyone else is a jackass because they dont immediately buy into your claims. Even the people who hunt bigfoot look for hair/tracks DNA, speak with people who claim they've seen something, etc. You've provided no data, actions, evidence, but it somehow is on equal standing with a countable number of bodies, data from hospitals, economic advisors and the models they've used for decades on a daily basis for any mundane reason.

People run away from talking with you because theres absolutely no reason to, your logic that you expect everyone to buy into defies common sense yet stands on its own with no evidence. If you declare the moon is cheese, it is so. You have no burden of proof, but the burden of proof on others is impossible because if it fits into the framework of the standard for collecting information and analyzing it, its somehow unreliable because thats what they want you to think. On top of that, you aren't particularly pleasant to talk to. Sticking your fingers in your ears and going NANANANA until the other party walks away doesn't make your points any less groundless, it just means you get to continue your conversation all by yourself. Look at BADecker, they're out there as well but people continue to entertain them because though the standard of proof is still impossible to present, at least every other word out of BADecker's mouth isn't, Sweet strawman you non sequitur logical fallacy, and righteous indignation.

Here is logic:
Assumption 1: Government wants you to continue paying your taxes and their salaries.
Assumption 2: They have plenty of employees to model different economic situations on retainer so they can decide economic policy.
Assumption 3: They have plenty of internal medical employees (CDC/FDA/NHS)

There is a deadly virus which we've both acknowledged exists. The government aims to maximize tax revenue to pay their salaries, compete in the global pissing contest that is, who has the highest GDPs/wealthiest countries etc. External medical personnel (in every country) said oh damn look at this virus, its bad, it'll cause X people to die and Y people to get sick. Internal government medical agencies see that information and go, yup that is right it looks like X people will die and Y people will get sick, here is what we should do (social distancing/shutdowns/masks). Trump administration that is not medical personnel says ok, we need to weigh X people dying and Y people getting sick with the economic damage that will be caused from the suggested measures. They get their wizards to model various scenarios and say, yup if we do this for this long, we'll lose $Z. So you compare the $ in X, Y, and Z and make a policy to minimize all three of those things.

So thats the logical course of action, why should we expect them to do that? Is it because we're government stooges? No, its because thats what their job is and whats in their best interest. The Berkeley economics major employed does not care a single iota about your rights, protecting them or taking them away. They don't get to hold your head down in the mud and make you eat worms whether they fudge the numbers or not. They just want to do their job and get a paycheck. Whenever I get my oil changed, I don't hugely worry about them using vegetable oil instead of motor oil, because the people working there have no reason to try to screw me over. The reasonable assumption is that people will do their job. Even if economics modeler A was disgruntled and secretly a spy sent to destroy our financial system, economics modeler B-Z6 would go, hey thats not right? So we've got this conclusion drawn by multiple medical professionals and multiple economics professionals that we should follow a certain plan to minimize the three concerns.

Nah, all of that logic is nonsense because the gubmint wants you to submit to them. We should assume they don't act on logic based on the resources they have available, and instead are just out to get us. They'll hurt their own wallets to tell people to stay inside. Medical researchers A-Z15 that are unrelated are just going to let lies pass through. Economics advisors who do this type of work on a daily basis are suddenly stricken with the brain dumb and are no longer competent to do their jobs. Economy is complex, so all of those forecasts that we've been doing all along are no longer able to be completed, and it is to be assumed that policy created is either a toss at a dart board, or an intentional act of destruction to... destroy themselves...?

On top of all of that, on the 1 in a trillion chance the US Government is actually doing all of this out of incompetence or malice, that would also imply every other country following the same plan is also doing this out of incompetence or malice. So we're now to either believe this is a global ploy, or that there is not a single competent government out there and every unrelated economics/medical team are all coming to similar conclusions absolutely by coincidence.

Nah, lets discard all of that and go with Communist ploy to take over the world. I spent 20 minutes writing a post, and rather than replying, "You see, here are the numbers that show X, Y, and Z, based on this model and as you can see at our current paces and projections, Z was always significantly higher. Don't forget the government also has voting interests in not letting people die over the economy" I'll get, YOU IDIOT GOVERNMENT STOOGE, THEY GOT YA! Some buzz words from debate club, and a rehashing of, they are out to get you so they'll act against their own interest in order to get you. If you question me or ask for more details, you're an idiot, and if you leave the thread because its pointless to continue as my words are gospel without a single iota of proof to my claim, you're running from the truuuuuth.

That dumbass government sturgeon general says drinking alcohol when pregnant is bad. WAKE UP PEOPLE!!1! They just don't want you to know that drinking alcohol when pregnant will help sterilize the baby so they come out super healthy and non reliant on expensive procedures and medicines. If we didn't take their word for it, everyone would have to become medical personnel working in a maternity ward in order to confirm for themselves the effects of alcohol on unborn children. If everyone was a doctor, then no one would be. (gradually getting quieter) Booooooom.

On a related note, whats actually happening is China/Russia/etc is feeding false information to downplay the pandemic in order to trick you into thinking its not as bad as we think. That causes people to resent the shut down orders, sparking rebellion, and forcing the government to stop the shut down, leaving everyone sick so they can invade with less resistance. Its the ole fashion double screw, you think we're being setup by our own government, but its actually another government, setting up our government to setup us! Its the perfect plan! Because its a possibility, I'll just assume that my assumption is correct rather than the official story that can't be true because its official. Anyone that disagrees with me is a strawman, non sequitur, patsy.

Man, I had one of those fancy scans, ground glass opacities in my lungs, and they didn't call it Covid. I'd hate to be somewhere where a cough means you are counted in the Covid statistics. If you like the UK's style of data gathering, why don't you analyze the covid situation over there instead? Or find a government that has standards of disease classification you like, and just look at their data.

You're approaching this from the wrong angle, people don't just decide policy based on nothing, its not logical. The economy is as you said a finely tuned and complicated machine, but it is analyzed and forecast on a daily basis. Its not some mysterious entity that the people who've been analyzing it for 30 years are unable to draw conclusions on. The Trump administration employs these wizards that have a full time job of saying, hey we should impose tariffs to incentive this sector because we predict that this earthquake in Uzbekistan will have this effect on the sector. But you're right, its far more reasonable and likely to assume they're just throwing darts at a dartboard to decide economic policy.

Not that it matters, but the lockdown idea was first applied in the 1300s where the term "quattuor" (later quarantine) comes from, to curb the spread of the bubonic plague. Its been applied for hundreds of years because it does work. Canada did lockdown measures in 2003 to stop the spread of SARS. South Korea did the same thing in 2015 with MERS. The US did social distancing and closure of businesses where patrons couldn't distance themselves in 1918. Epidemics aren't all that rare, its just that the ones that we've had in the US in the past 100 years were more or less treatable with vaccines which isn't the case this time around.

Even if I was to entertain the idea of US Government incompetence and decided that you knew better how to manage the economy than the consensus of all of the people they employ, what about Canada? What about every other country in the world doing the same measures (albeit substantially more successfully than us). They all have different governments with different interests, yet their medical and economic advisors are more or less telling them the same things.

Yes, do not drink bleach.

The point is that we need to come to an agreement on a baseline source of information, otherwise none of anything either of us says matters. For all we know, it might be as low as a few hundred or less, or maybe over a billion. Perhaps Covid doesn't actually exist, or maybe it turns you into a zombie. Like I said, I just picked the CDC because its your government's official channel of information.

Pick any reputable source you'd like. If you are super concerned about the probable deaths being temporarily listed in the data, look only at the data thats a week old so that corrections are made. Or look at where the data is coming from where its still broken down into probable and confirmed cases and draw your conclusions from that. My state has it broken down this way

Do not drink bleach.

I love ya buddy, but you don't know anything about "science". We can observe the tiny little bad guys in the body with a variety of methods. You don't get labeled as having covid because you go to the doctor with a cough anymore than you get labeled as having tuberculosis. At the most extreme you'd get labeled as a possible covid patient while you're waiting for the test results. The published statistics have a breakdown of confirmed and probable cases, and a note that the numbers are amended as the test results come back positive for negative. I cannot explain the concept of testing to an extent that you'll understand or accept so I'm just going to have to move past that.

I'll certainly offer understanding for someone who wants to say, well I don't necessarily trust the CDC and point to contradictory information coming from another well respected medical facility. The point though is that there isn't contradictory information coming out, so I felt it was most appropriate to cite the CDC considering the thread is about Medical Experts within the Trump Administration. You can find the same information coming out of Johns Hopkins, NIH, Canada/European/Zimbabwe's public health agencies, so I'm more than willing to stop using the CDC as an example and switch over to data collected by any other reputable medical facility.

The Trump administration has both the manpower and expertise to collect the necessary information to make public statements. Relying on conclusions from people who don't have either is asinine. If you're able to find a reasonable motive that the government would take trillions in damage to lie, you can then look for dissenting opinions from respected medical facilities. In this case, the published information is corroborated by both the private and public sector in every country that has put public statements out. If you think that the US government is out to get you, get your information from Norway, they don't care about you in the slightest. If you want to chase this down some delusional one in a billion global scheme by a coalition of secret trillionaires that have the influence to manipulate 50 million people or so, let me know and we can have fun with it. I'll be the opposing side offering equally likely scenarios involving complete economic collapse, global anarchy, zombies, etc.

If you think the people making predictive models that are influencing the Trump administration's decisions aren't accounting for the amount of wear in people's socks as an indicator of economic distress, do it yourself.

I have not, but I have dealt extensively with Johns Hopkins and if you'd like to skip the CDC, I'd recommend them since they are one of the most competent medical institutions in the world. Though the CDC is just verifying Hopkins findings and regurgitating them to the public. I don't really have much opinion on the CDC at all, but the info that they're putting out isn't much different than that of any other country.

You are correct! Economics isn't my forte, so I rely on millions of people who do understand economics to create economic policy. I don't understand 100% of the Bitcoin code, so I rely on all of the other people who understand it to point out if there is a problem. What you call appeal to authority is just how humans overcome the fact that we don't live long enough to gather mastery of all subject matters. Every time you drive over a bridge without researching and understanding all of the structural properties, you are by your own definition "appealing to authority" by trusting the engineers who built the bridge to keep you safe.

I believe the government is here to screw us over when it benefits them. If it doesn't benefit them, I have no reason to believe that they're acting dishonestly. Again, it is in the government's best interest to aim for the best possible financial outcome. I do not have the manpower or resources to adequately collect the data to model the intersection between financial damage from the shutdown and projection of financial damage from unchecked Covid19. If you do, I'd completely unsarcastically love to see your predictions if you care to explain them. I don't wholeheartedly pledge my allegiance to the government, I acknowledge that it has the ability to coordinate efforts between large groups of people that do know what they're doing to collect the data necessary to make a plan. The entirety of your point is that we shouldn't trust the government because they're the government. its somehow a bad thing to listen to people who have expertise in something you don't. I trust the consensus of the medical community. I value the consensus of the business community. I believe that the government has the ability to use its own people to verify the consensus of the medical community (the CDC for example) to come to a decision about the outlook of Covid from the medical community (and its own economic advisors). It then takes that input, and crunches the numbers to come to a plan on the best possible solution. Why? Because thats their job... when people have a job to do, if they don't have any reason to do it dishonestly they typically dont.

I bet they'll give it a try. I frankly don't understand how the federal reserve works. I share the sentiment of a lot of people here in thinking that fiat isn't stable, yet it keeps surprising me and managing to avoid the devastating effects common sense would leave you expecting through all of the recent rounds of quantitative easing, financial policy that I guess I just don't get, and other "strategic money printing". Fiat works just fine as a short term exchange medium I guess? My uninformed guess is that the fraction that was paid out to individuals in the stimulus bill will be used as an excuse to retrieve the full amount back in increased taxes, funneling money to buy corporate handjobs and lobby support, but I could be pleasantly surprised. Paying out 600 billion as an excuse to recollect 2 trillion seems like a good business model.

Nah don't worry I'm on your side now actually. I'm down with putting on the plague mask and burning down houses with those infected inside of them to stop the infection like the good ole days when we didn't have medical professionals to boss us around. I don't actually trust that anyone knows how the economy works, so I'm just asking people how many times they've had money in the past week and relying on that rather than teams of experts with sophisticated modeling software that've been doing this for decades. Those jerks that make economic predictions based on billions of datapoints and millions of variables every week to determine what stocks to buy and advise the government on interest rates, and various other actions are witches as far as I'm concerned.

Sodium chloride (NaCl) is just as effective and even cheaper than the active ingredient Sodium Hypochlorite in bleach (NaClO) since you don't have to pay for the extra oxygen.
 

Permitted flow, I guess "off topic" or not is somewhat dependent on the subject matter as well as a number of other factors. A short jab at someone that uses sarcasm to imply a point may be acceptable in a thread where someone is asking for feedback on their business idea, whereas it might not be acceptable for someone panicking asking for time sensitive technical support. Its tough to give a clear cut guide for what is and isn't ok, because its sort of a set of informal rules developed by the Bitcointalk discourse group that you get the feel for just by viewing posts here and seeing what people expect. As a general guideline, intent is as important as the subject matter. If you throw a friendly/neutral or even constructive off topic reply at someone, its far less likely to get reported. If you make the most amazing off topic post, however your intent is obvious that its just for post count, its still not safe from scrutiny. Aside from intent, you also end back at the unintentional effects of your post. If you make a post thats marginally on topic but directly draws conversation that is off topic and is distracting from the original purpose of the thread, it'll be far more likely to be deleted than just a single somewhat off topic post that doesn't grab the following conversation.

As I said it really depends so I can only speak about general scenarios, but I always liked the one thread of consciousness determination. If a reader can read your post without any additional information and see how it relates to the OP, it is in most cases fine. If you need additional explanation to see how it relates back to the OP, depending on all of the other factors mentioned previously, it has a higher risk of being considered off topic.

For example, lets say someone creates a thread about major mainstream retailers accepting Bitcoin. The subject matter of their post is speculation about why there are so many 3rd party sites that facilitate transactions, but they are not directly accepted. 

It is probably acceptable to directly respond to the OP's thoughts, talk about major sales channels (Amazon/Ebay/etc) or the 3rd parties involved with relation to Bitcoin. Where things get a little uncertain is how far off the main train of thought you can go before it starts going off topic. General discussion about the CEO of Ebay would be two streams of consciousness off of the main topic, unless you are drawing some kind of conclusion back to that main point. At this point it sort of diverges. If your post is marginally on topic and holds no risk of dragging the rest of the conversation off topic, its probably OK even two streams of consciousness away from the main point. If its very easy to draw a connection back to the main point, even if you are starting to veer off topic, its probably an acceptable post. On the flip side, if you are on the main idea and you write about a specific 3rd party service with the intent to advertise it, it might be considered off topic, even though you are on the main train of thought.

Its sort of difficult to tell you exactly what you're looking for, as you're asking for definitive information about acceptable social behavior. A lot of it is based on the vibe, not specific rules.

Unless its different than any other check, it will have the beneficiaries name on it. To cash it, you'll have to sign the back of it and write other details on it, "for deposit only account # signature" and I suppose with electronic check cashing it might be possible to cash it after selling it. And yes, all checks void after a certain amount of time.

I'd guess your best bet would be to buy one thats already been cashed so you don't have to worry about the other details.

You're right, those guys are gems.





I'm sure I'll get yelled at for throwing shade when its way more funny than insulting but this was reported on a month ago https://local.theonion.com/man-just-buying-one-of-every-cleaning-product-in-case-t-1842493766

With regards to risk analysis, its a game of balancing the risk and reward. The convenience of motor vehicles is something we've agreed is worth taking the risk of dying in a car crash, but we wear seat belts and strive for higher safety engineering. 1 in 900,000 people will choke to death this month. Last month, 1 in 82,500 died of Covid. So far this month it was 1 in 6600. Absolutely, certain things in life are unavoidable. We live surrounded by dogs, vehicles, fast food, bath tubs all things that can kill you. You can't live paralyzed by fear, but we typically strive to make the best possible choices for our own well being.

You brought up an interesting point about the asymptomatic thing. On one hand, we may consider ourselves lucky that Covid doesn't have the 35% mortality rate of MERS. On the other hand, when you catch the flu, you know within a day or two and are then on your couch eating soup until you're feeling better. With Covid, you're running around feeling fine exposing other people who may or may not end up feeling fine. You could go out for a jog and then go chat with Grandma or little Timmy, and then they've croaked. The death statistics are important, but the hospitalization rate is also incredibly important. Assuming medical care is available, its not cheap. The things that put you in the high risk category for Covid aren't just rare lung diseases or being 97 years old. They're things like obesity, asthma, high blood pressure, and diabetes, things that effect more than 50% of Americans. There are essentially four outcomes with Covid, either you are asymptomatic and don't get sick at all, you get a really shitty but not life threatening two week illness, you end up in the hospital with a mountain of medical bills, or you die (and still wrack up medical bills). Three out of four of those are bad options, and option #1 isn't fantastic either for the sake of spread of contagion.

Every decision we will ever make is based on predictions. We predicted and are still predicting the effects of Covid, time will tell how things end up, but its typically better to contain the problem rather than try to deal with it later if its possible to at all. We can both throw out a million what if scenarios, what if we had shut down all international travel in January, or if New York's travel restrictions weren't put in place and we had hundreds of thousands of people traveling from New York to our states today? What I'm finding interesting is that people want to compare based on the results right this moment rather than the predictions. There were 4000 deaths last month, 50,000 so far this month, shouldn't we wait until the number stops jumping before we start drawing conclusions about mission success? I'm glad it hasn't been climbing exponentially to this point  but what number next month do you think would justify the current measures? If we stay level and tack on another 50,000 next month would we be winning the battle? If it hops up to 500,000 are we losing?

I'd have to look at a lot of data before making a statement about empty hospitals, that hasn't been my experience, but I'm also looking at the mid Atlantic to northeast corridor, not the country as a whole in depth. We've got fancy statistics here on hospital capacity, death demographics and all sorts of other interesting things if you'd like to take a look. https://coronavirus.maryland.gov/

Ah, quick final thought, its a prediction that having covid right now will leave you immune next month. Its a fairly new development that covid is causing blood clots in patients. We don't know for certain whether covid will become a seasonal thing like the flu, we don't know if it'll be convenient like the flu and give us a full year before a new strain makes its way around, we don't know know for certain that this isn't a one and done situation.

*edit*

Would you mind sharing where you're finding hospital bed availability data? I'm trying to search by state, in general, but I'm not finding anything besides buzzfeed articles from March.

*edit edit*

When I say I'm supporting a unified effort, I mean this is acceptable: https://www.whitehouse.gov/openingamerica/#criteria
I'm good with following this plan. What I'm not content with is disregarding the plan because individuals decide for themselves that they're tired of staying home and the beaches are nice this time of year. Letting individuals pick and choose what criteria they feel like following puts the entire country's health in jeopardy. The white house put together their team, they made a plan of action for how we can tell we're ready to reopen and how to safely reopen and monitor to make sure it stays within expectations. If things start getting out of hand, we step backward rather than jumping to stage 3 right now and then spending the next year playing containment and dealing with collateral damage.

*edit edit edit*

So I did find some information on hospital bed availability. https://covidtracking.com/data this site redirects you to each individual state's "best current data source for ____" and maybe half or so have information on availability of hospital beds. I'm seeing pretty consistent 33-50% availability in non heavily impacted states. Colorado, Illinois, Alaska, Indiana, etc.

I'm fine with Tecshare being a prick, what gets to me is how you act like a prick, someone responds in kind, and then you pull the victim card and can immediately discredit anything anyone says because they had the audacity to criticize you (or others apparently). You would disagree with someone reading you the dictionary if they prefaced it with an insult.



Your statement regarding unemployment in parentheses is correct. The conditions for getting unemployment were changed due to corona virus. When you legally can work whether every doctor (and the federal government) is saying DO NOT, your unemployment stops getting paid to you. The legal protections in place now keeping the utility companies from turning off service and all of the other related emergency measures dry up when the emergency measures end. So, while you in theory have a choice whether you go back to work or not, your real choice is go back to work or have your lights turned off. I quickly digress that unemployment is not welfare because someone will bring it up if I dont. A portion of your paycheck is withheld from you to pay you in case you end up needing it. No one is sitting on their asses collecting checks, they're just getting their own money back without interest. Its as much a gift from the government as your tax refund when they overcharge you the rest of the year.

A unified plan keeps people from being tossed out on the street until the conditions are met to safely reopen. The thing that kills me about the predictions being called unreliable is how linear regression works. You get a bunch of statisticians in a room that ask for raw data on how infection travels from people who specialize in the spread of viruses. Check out the yearly flu prediction competitions and you'll see that these same people often end up off by a few thousand cases world wide. What people are finding fault in isn't the models, its that the models cannot predict parameters that aren't given to it. They couldn't predict mandatory social distancing measures before the idea of mandatory social distancing measures were considered. Just imagine how many people would get the flu if we went through these lengths? You'd likely see the ~45 million yearly cases become substantially less, though we don't need to because the real risk is mitigated by the vaccine. The predictions decreasing from the worst case scenario means that we're doing something right. When the predictions go in the opposite direction, that means we're likely doing something wrong.

Keeping the patient load under hospital capacity is incredibly important as you mentioned. I don't know where the hospitals are empty, but I'm glad they aren't having corona issues at this time and I hope it remains that way. I obviously understand that New York is going to be hit harder than Montana, so it absolutely makes sense to have Montana open up on a different date than New York. I'm advocating that we all follow the same federal guidelines regarding conditions for opening and not letting Jim the plumber decide when hes ready to go back to work. It should make sense that Montana being impacted less so than New York would also reach those conditions sooner. I'm in Maryland and we've been hit fairly hard because of interstate travel. A lot of people here travel for work, lots of government employees and such, and thats why we're disproportionately effected despite aggressive measures to slow it down. Maryland and Virginia are working on our states situations jointly because both governors understand that if you lift restrictions in border states, people will travel from one to another and if both aren't ready, we get a few more months of lockdown instead of steady cautious reopening. Georgia for example has a vested interest in also monitoring whats going on in Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The goal is that nice steady reopening, not going "Oh shit, we opened a week early, quick we need to contain" mode."    

Dr.Birx is part of the corona virus task force, she does not have the authority to set any standards for the CDC to follow. The CDC reported statistics are by their own standards as others have posted in this thread. Each state, the CDC, the media, etc has their own method of reporting. For the sake of consistency, I've used the CDC's report when talking about any numbers as they are the most universally trustworthy source we can go for. There are absolutely errors in the numbers, the people who are getting tested are those deemed necessary of getting tested. I got tested and had my results back within 24 hours, other people are just told, yeah sounds like you've got covid, stay home (they aren't counted). On the other hand, there are a lot of unexplained deaths that may or may not be covid related. New York had significantly more people found dead at home than normal (I want to say it was 8x greater than normal but I'll update with the number after finding a reputable source) , we don't know what portion of them died due to the flu, covid, etc. I'll just say its likely that we are under reporting deaths, and under reporting the number of cases. I don't know about the nursing home thing, I'll just say thats awfully shitty.


And your final point that I was excited to get to. While your conclusion is slightly different than mine, this is the whole point I've been trying to get across. A good solid brief period of lockdown would help out immensely. Every time people ignore the recommendations and get themselves or others sick, they extend the lockdown for everyone. Our choices are a shorter and effective unified effort, or a surprisingly small number of jerks can extend this out for months for us. If we could trust everyone to take personal responsibility, we'd have recommendations, not orders. So now we have to put up with orders instead of recommendations, and the clock starts going again. The goal is to move away from orders and back to recommendations. If we don't move forward with this, we get more strict orders. In Europe they actually enforced stay at home orders, here they're nicely telling us to stay at home unless your travel is essential. It'd be awfully nice if we could avoid that.

*edit* Heres what should be an acceptable source for the NY dying at home thing I mentioned. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/08/829506542/after-deaths-at-home-in-nyc-officials-plan-to-count-many-as-covid-19