Another Avoidable Wave?
The big story of spring 2021 pandemic is vaccines versus variants. But in a political environment where everyone (especially Republicans) seem eager to stop trying as soon as things start getting better (if not immediately), the approach to this uncertainty is to look at the current delta and declare the problem solved. "Cases are going down, lol!"
Well, in my home state of Massachusetts, cases were going down, lol. (Same for the country as a whole.) Maybe this means variants are winning and we're going to get pandemic wave three before this is over. (Depending on how you count. Looking at the US cases graph I'd call it wave four, MA three. But in one sense it's wave one happening in distinct regions at two distinct times, followed by another big wave approximately everywhere as fall weather set in.) I expect there will be at least a few weeks of waiting to see if vaccination, aided by warmer weather, catches up and cases go down again ("it's probably just a temporary blip lol"). Maybe it will! If not, then ???
(And that's assuming the virus doesn't see its shadow in which case we get another three months of pandemic. And that's with it getting a lot of extra opportunities to stick its evolutionary head out and have a look around. And with America ready to move on to its plan B (for some, plan A) of "vehemently insist everything is fine and no mitigation is no problem".)
This video (from Business Insider in last October) about how the Trump administration reacted to the pandemic came across my YouTube homepage today, and it's striking just how much the administration did to undermine the substantial existing capacity this country had developed (including under Republican administrations) to deal with just this sort of situation. I mostly assume that the US isn't politically capable of doing the "actually handle the pandemic" approach. Obviously, the China approach is too harsh by US standards, and the South Korea / Taiwan / New Zealand / Australia / etc. approach is at least made more difficult by geography. At best, we could do something like Canada or some parts of Europe. (And note some parts of Europe did worse!) But the comparison the video makes to South Korea is still pretty striking. The US government was aware of the problem as early, and the difference in capacity for doing the sorts of things South Korea did to bring the situation under control seems like it was much less than the difference in execution would imply.
For all that Americans talk about our political tradeoff as "lives saved versus the economy", the "actually get the pandemic under control" Australia / South Korea / etc. approach worked really well in terms of the usual measures of "the economy", in addition to avoiding death and disease and getting people more time with parents and grandparents. It doesn't make sense until you realize that the US equivocates between "the economy" and "laissez-faire capitalism specifically", that is "the economy" and any sort of central planning or regulation are diametrically opposed by definition. To be honest, I'm a bit surprised the US wasn't even less willing to do pandemic mitigation. As is, we can only get by the immediate catastrophe before it's "cases are going down lol".
(In not all bad news in the world news, the boat is loose, so there's that.) This entry was originally posted on Dreamwith.
comments are there.
Well, in my home state of Massachusetts, cases were going down, lol. (Same for the country as a whole.) Maybe this means variants are winning and we're going to get pandemic wave three before this is over. (Depending on how you count. Looking at the US cases graph I'd call it wave four, MA three. But in one sense it's wave one happening in distinct regions at two distinct times, followed by another big wave approximately everywhere as fall weather set in.) I expect there will be at least a few weeks of waiting to see if vaccination, aided by warmer weather, catches up and cases go down again ("it's probably just a temporary blip lol"). Maybe it will! If not, then ???
(And that's assuming the virus doesn't see its shadow in which case we get another three months of pandemic. And that's with it getting a lot of extra opportunities to stick its evolutionary head out and have a look around. And with America ready to move on to its plan B (for some, plan A) of "vehemently insist everything is fine and no mitigation is no problem".)
This video (from Business Insider in last October) about how the Trump administration reacted to the pandemic came across my YouTube homepage today, and it's striking just how much the administration did to undermine the substantial existing capacity this country had developed (including under Republican administrations) to deal with just this sort of situation. I mostly assume that the US isn't politically capable of doing the "actually handle the pandemic" approach. Obviously, the China approach is too harsh by US standards, and the South Korea / Taiwan / New Zealand / Australia / etc. approach is at least made more difficult by geography. At best, we could do something like Canada or some parts of Europe. (And note some parts of Europe did worse!) But the comparison the video makes to South Korea is still pretty striking. The US government was aware of the problem as early, and the difference in capacity for doing the sorts of things South Korea did to bring the situation under control seems like it was much less than the difference in execution would imply.
For all that Americans talk about our political tradeoff as "lives saved versus the economy", the "actually get the pandemic under control" Australia / South Korea / etc. approach worked really well in terms of the usual measures of "the economy", in addition to avoiding death and disease and getting people more time with parents and grandparents. It doesn't make sense until you realize that the US equivocates between "the economy" and "laissez-faire capitalism specifically", that is "the economy" and any sort of central planning or regulation are diametrically opposed by definition. To be honest, I'm a bit surprised the US wasn't even less willing to do pandemic mitigation. As is, we can only get by the immediate catastrophe before it's "cases are going down lol".
(In not all bad news in the world news, the boat is loose, so there's that.) This entry was originally posted on Dreamwith.
comments are there.