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How's your life affected by Covid-19?

Anyone else noticed the number of fake news and misinformation spread on the internet multiplied by 100x the day the people in the US got infected?

- Piotr
Alas, it's inevitable, it's ALL going to happen: fake cures, government or [insert target ethnic group of choice] conspiracy theories. At times of extreme crisis, both the very best and worst of people is spotlighted. Just how it is.
 
This is a thread about how it affects us personally. A short as possible digression needed as background if I could:

rGames post might have been well meaning. The most positive interpretation would be: don't waste your time complaining about a criminal, and criminally incompetent charlatan, put your energies where they can do some good.

If that's the intention then great, but I don't agree. Donald Trump is going to be directly responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, I pray it will not be more than that. His idiotic right wing ideology (which he doesn't believe in, he doesn't believe in anything, he just goes with whatever gets him attention) and his brutal incompetence and ignorance led him to dismantle the pandemic unit of the security council. We were prepared for something like this, and he shut down the mechanism. To save money. He then ignored the warnings, refused information and help from the WHO. When the outbreak began, he joked about it, lied about it. He is now playing states against each other for resources.

Back to how it affects us. My wife has been in critical care after open heart surgery. She had several setbacks but is now progressing. It will be a slow recovery, taking time but all signals point to her making a full recovery. She was in ICU for several weeks, and is now in a rehab hospital. They take every precaution there because of the covid19 epidemic, so I cannot even visit her there, which is hard for her, though normally she'd be happy as hell to be rid of me for a nice long stretch, right now she needs all the support I can give her.

If she were to get the novel coronavirus, it would most likely kill her. Though normally tough as hell, she's very frail right now and there are pulmonary issues being worked through along with everything else.

So this is how this is affecting me. If she gets the virus and dies, then as far as I'm concerned Donald Trump fucking killed her.

We knew this guy was a menace, and that if anything really bad happened, we'd be in a lot of trouble. Well it did, and we are. In the 80s and 90s he was a joke, a famous failure. Then he became a sleezy tv character, the perfect celebrity for the increasingly stupid, dumbed down right wing america. Now he is about to add mass murder to his resume. If it includes my wife, I'm going to get mad.
 
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I had a service call today at a storage warehouse next to a hospital in the metro-Detroit area. The hospital has become a Covid-19 only hospital due to the surge in cases. Upon arrival, I called my on site contact to get access into the warehouse and was told that the door was open because they were doing some construction inside. He then told me that they were converting the warehouse into a makeshift morgue. It was quite disturbing. The building is large, and I don't know if they are converting part of it or all of it, but the sight and idea of this just left me with an awful, sad feeling.

Stay safe everyone.
 
In terms of the federal government vs states:

As my governor Andrew Cuomo says more than once every day, he is bidding against other governors. He wants to pay $4 for a mask, another bids $5, then another governor bids $6. They are all bidding against the federal government. This is not the way to do things, and it will cost a lot of lives.

All this purchasing of medical supplies should be done by the federal government and then dispersed according to need. My state, New York, has half of the cases, but we got 1% of our request. Other states got 30% - 100% of their requests. This is murder by politics as usual, no way around it.

So I don't think this is Trump-bashing. I think it's reasonable that this point should be made over and over and over until the federal government does step up. And Cuomo is doing exactly that every morning.
 
I also wish the feds would do more and certainly the states bidding against each other is one thing that was not thought of ahead of time or they would have tried to work around that from the get go..

In defense of the feds: Its not necessarily that easy to do as you/we wish. It takes manpower to accomplish everything. There are many explanations made for why each state should manage their own situation independently because trying to manage the entire country of 330million people centrally may not even be a realistic expectation of what is possible.

Also President Trump is just one guy. he can't micro manage and control every single facet of this or any other nationwide situation. And in fact if he tried to, there would probably be civil unrest over it. Fema and numerous other bureaucrats are involved at many different levels. Part of the reason our government is specifically designed for local jurisdictions to handle situations like this as much as possible is because its simply not even logistically possibly for the federal government to come out of nowhere while the whole country is under duress at the same time and manage the whole thing. The localities are in fact the best ones to manage their own jurisdictions. Just as Cuomo is doing!

Where I think in retrospect we can look at how maybe the federal government could have provided, or could from here forward, provide more centralized influence, would be for example the control of travel between states. Perhaps a stronger message earlier on about telling people to stay home (shrug), but I think Americans themselves are to blame for not social distancing themselves...not the federal government or POTUS. It would not matter in the least who the POTUS was/is. Americans don't want to accept that reality and they will always try to push the limit and see if they can get away with more then the leaders are telling them to do. That is our nature and the nature of most western democracies actually. Acquisition of masks and things like that...not an easy problem. There aren't enough of them. Perhaps the feds should have bought them all first and told the governors to wait. But then some govs would have complained that the big brother feds were blocking them! And they'd probably have a constitutional basis to make a law suit over it I might add.

POTUS has negotiated with GM to build hundreds of thousands of ventilators and with 3M to manufacture millions of face masks. Its not accurate to say they are doing "nothing". They are doing lots. But it is simply not an easy problem to support 330 million people from 50 different states...each state having a different opinion about where the assets should be going first! Cuomo obviously thinks it should all go to him first...and maybe very well so...but if and when it slams the next state...if Cuomo has all the "stuff", then they will be screaming bloody murder.

I'm sure we will see some good things happening from POTUS, Fema, CDC and local jurisdictions...and we will see some mistakes made...but the finger pointing about one side being the devil that is killing everyone...is simply not accurate and not helpful.

kind regards
 
You don't have to get in touch with all 330 million people, just the companies who make and sell medical protective gear. And entities that have protective gear that they want to donate.

All Trump has to do is go on TV and say: from now on, sell or donate EVERYTHING to FEMA. Then FEMA would look at how many cases there are in the US and give them where there is need. This is what FEMA is trained to do. This is what every governor and expert wants to be done.

185,270 Coronavirus cases in the US. 75,795 in New York. Doesn't it make sense to sent the fair proportion there? And the same to all the states who have the most need right now, like New Jersey (18,596), Michigan (7615), California (7453), and so on.

We need to get rid of politics at a moment like this, like we did after 9/11. No more Republicans or Democrats, Red or Blue. The Coronavirus has already killed more people than died on 9/11. We lost 3000 people that day. We will soon be losing a LOT more than 3000 people a day, and it will double and double after that.
 
I am not saying that anyone needs to "get in touch with" 330 million people. I am saying that trying to manage the situation across 50 states all at once is simply not how our society was designed. We are a nation of states....and numerous different levels. like it or not, that is what we are. California needs to take care of California the same way the EU can't do much to help Italy.
 
185,270 Coronavirus cases in the US. 75,795 in New York. Doesn't it make sense to sent the fair proportion there? And the same to all the states who have the most need right now, like New Jersey (18,596), Michigan (7615), California (7453), and so on.

Central Planning is not what we do here. That is what Communist and Socialist governments do. it is simply not realistic to think that suddenly in an emergency our country can snap to attention and behave more like a centrally planned one. They are trying to do what they can do. They will not be able to do everything.

Who decides what the correct proportion of resources should be? Whomever tries to decide that will be crucified by the mob.

The sheer magnitude of this task is not fully appreciated by many. They seem to think our federal government can snap their fingers and save everyone like in the movies. It just isn't designed that way. Our society is based on the notion of people taking care of themselves. that isn't to say they aren't going to try to help. They just gave away $2T! But we are not built, with systems in place to handle a situation like this at that magnitude. Simple as that.
 
In terms of the federal government vs states:

As my governor Andrew Cuomo says more than once every day, he is bidding against other governors. He wants to pay $4 for a mask, another bids $5, then another governor bids $6. They are all bidding against the federal government. This is not the way to do things, and it will cost a lot of lives.

All this purchasing of medical supplies should be done by the federal government and then dispersed according to need. My state, New York, has half of the cases, but we got 1% of our request. Other states got 30% - 100% of their requests. This is murder by politics as usual, no way around it.

So I don't think this is Trump-bashing. I think it's reasonable that this point should be made over and over and over until the federal government does step up. And Cuomo is doing exactly that every morning.
I wonder how many of these states need these things yet. Visions of toilet paper and hand sanitizer all over again.
 
The governor of my state just said on TV yesterday that my state (utah) only has 500 ICU units in the entire state!

I can assure you we are way off the radar at the moment because we are in the early stages....but in a month from now...we will need them badly too...just as badly as NYC, and I do not think for one second that NY will be done with them by then either.
 
Sorry this is utterly beside the point. Arguing about the smartest, most efficient division of responsibilities during this crisis would be a critical and necessary discussion to have, if there were not an irresponsible lunatic in the white house. Thanks to his ignorance and political posturing, Trump is not just not helping, he has been actively obstructing any coherent, effective action.

He most certainly did not enlist GM to make ventilators. They were already in the process of doing just that, he got involved, got his feelings hurt and set the process back. He's a f*cking idiot:


Governors are having to praise him in their press conferences for fear that he will withhold the material, funds and assistance they need. It's been the same all the way through this nightmare of a presidency. After discovering how inept, how dangerous he is expert after expert has found they can either resign in protest, or kiss his ass so that at least their expertise is still in the picture. Fauci and Birx seem to be in this position at the moment. He governs by blackmail, operates like a low ranking, inept Jersey City mob captain.

Having a reasoned discussion about what is and what is not the responsibility of states and feds here is utterly fatuous. The government may be able to get us out of this with no more than 100k dead, I f*cking hope so. But I am so sick of people have discussions about how government should operate when Donald Trump is in office and the GOP is willing to do whatever the hell he wants, knowing full well what a danger he presents. This is a crisis, not a time for pleasant theorizing.


I also wish the feds would do more and certainly the states bidding against each other is one thing that was not thought of ahead of time or they would have tried to work around that from the get go..

In defense of the feds: Its not necessarily that easy to do as you/we wish. It takes manpower to accomplish everything. There are many explanations made for why each state should manage their own situation independently because trying to manage the entire country of 330million people centrally may not even be a realistic expectation of what is possible.

Also President Trump is just one guy. he can't micro manage and control every single facet of this or any other nationwide situation. And in fact if he tried to, there would probably be civil unrest over it. Fema and numerous other bureaucrats are involved at many different levels. Part of the reason our government is specifically designed for local jurisdictions to handle situations like this as much as possible is because its simply not even logistically possibly for the federal government to come out of nowhere while the whole country is under duress at the same time and manage the whole thing. The localities are in fact the best ones to manage their own jurisdictions. Just as Cuomo is doing!

Where I think in retrospect we can look at how maybe the federal government could have provided, or could from here forward, provide more centralized influence, would be for example the control of travel between states. Perhaps a stronger message earlier on about telling people to stay home (shrug), but I think Americans themselves are to blame for not social distancing themselves...not the federal government or POTUS. It would not matter in the least who the POTUS was/is. Americans don't want to accept that reality and they will always try to push the limit and see if they can get away with more then the leaders are telling them to do. That is our nature and the nature of most western democracies actually. Acquisition of masks and things like that...not an easy problem. There aren't enough of them. Perhaps the feds should have bought them all first and told the governors to wait. But then some govs would have complained that the big brother feds were blocking them! And they'd probably have a constitutional basis to make a law suit over it I might add.

POTUS has negotiated with GM to build hundreds of thousands of ventilators and with 3M to manufacture millions of face masks. Its not accurate to say they are doing "nothing". They are doing lots. But it is simply not an easy problem to support 330 million people from 50 different states...each state having a different opinion about where the assets should be going first! Cuomo obviously thinks it should all go to him first...and maybe very well so...but if and when it slams the next state...if Cuomo has all the "stuff", then they will be screaming bloody murder.

I'm sure we will see some good things happening from POTUS, Fema, CDC and local jurisdictions...and we will see some mistakes made...but the finger pointing about one side being the devil that is killing everyone...is simply not accurate and not helpful.

kind regards
 
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