The problem for the Times and everybody else who favors and advocates for lock downs... They don't work.
The best proof of all that lock downs do not work... China.
The province in China Hubei that they did ‘locked down’ has 3,169 deaths. The rest of the country that 'hasn’t' been locked down... 122 deaths. Lock downs are a mistake and they have been from the start. Italy was the first western county to 'lock down'... The result... 8,215 deaths and counting. Spain... Not much better there... 4,365 deaths and counting.
Meanwhile, China is not locked down at all now in any province... Japan never locked down. Two of the strongest economy's in the world and this nonsense will make them both stronger. The US on the other hand and many other western countries have destroyed their economies with panic prescribed by the same scientist who brought you global warming.
Mask and actually isolating travelers from everyone including their families, is they key to combating this virus. Not lock downs.
Trump is the only leader the US has right now. He is the only one thinking weeks and months ahead not 1 day at a time. We need to think beyond containing the Virus and make sure the US Economy survives it.
The number of critical cases is 5%. The total number of US Cases is about 85,000. total US population is about 331,000,.000. We cannot destroy the US, and the Worlds, economy out of panic and fear.
There has to start being some rational thoughtful cost benefit analysis. This “fear” mindset we developed over the last few decades needs to be fixed. We throw ourselves into a panic and demand “Government Do SOMETHING” just about weekly over some “crisis” without ever thinking through the costs and problems the “solution” creates. This response to the Virus is the best example
People have to deal with the world as it is right now, not as they wish it would work. There is NOTHING any human can do to make you 100% safe. We need to stop thinking it can be made so.
The US Economy cannot be locked for months without triggering a 2nd Great Depression.
Corporations employ tend of millions of people. Corporations are everything from your local privately own gas station down the street to massive operations like Ford or Delta Airlines.
Corporations have debt they have to play just like people. For example, When they build a new store or plant, they borrow money to finance the capital expense. In addition, they do not usually pay cash for daily supply deliveries. Those are purchased are made on credit with 15-30-45-60 days terms to make payment. All those debt payments still have to be made even thought the Government shut them down or put a lock down on their customers.
Here is an example. I work for a Food Manufacturing corporation that employs about 5,000 people nation wide. Due to the loss of business from the slow down, they just cut all Executive and Sr Management salaries 20%. If this goes one 2 more weeks, they will cut middle management salaries, if it goes on a month they have to cut all salaries. After that they start laying off worker bees like me and shutting down production lines. Why? Because they have to have the money to make their debt payments now and hope they can make it up to employees later.
We are lucky. We are considered an “Essential Business” so we are not shut down like the Airlines or the Car companies. The US, and the World, are on the brink of a financial crisis like nothing seen since the 1929.
Those credit bills have to be paid even if businesses are shut down by Government order. The people supplying them need to be paid so they can pay their suppliers and creditor and so on and so on.
If they are not paid, this will trigger a cascading financial default on scale with what happened in 1929. We not talking about just crashing our economy here, we talking trashing the worlds economy if this is not addressed
The US has to be getting back to work in weeks, not months like the hysteric liars in the professional political class, and their shameless toadies in the Fake News, are trying to convince you.
https://twitter.com/tealabco/status/1242796491946610693?s=21
The above tweet shows that Japan is using another drug that no one is paying much attention to.
One thing that Japan, and indeed all of East Asia, has going for them is they are not reluctant to wear masks. Here if you wear a mask people assume you have the disease and treat you like a leper. This discourages even sick people from wearing them. But in East Asian countries everybody, sick or not, dons a mask as soon as the pandemic starts so there is no stigma. Food for thought.
Only after The New York Times hires a better editor.
Japan has few immigrants and tourist numbers are not that great.
Some cultures understand discipline and sacrifice, some don’t.
Some cultures understand discipline and sacrifice, some don’t.
We don’t know what happened in China.
Potenial lockdown looming ...In the meantime :
” Tokyo is on edge after Gov. Yuriko Koike called on residents Wednesday night to stay inside, work remotely and avoid nonessential outings this weekend to avoid an explosive rise in the number of novel coronavirus infections...”
” Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike said Monday that a citywide lockdown may become “the only option left” if various measures fail to prevent an explosive rise in the novel coronavirus in the capital...”
It’s like masks might actually be a good idea. Who would have thought? / s
The Slimes (and Cuomo and Pelosi and the rest of them) hope for even more deaths in the US
Japan is having the same thing happen to them that Singapore and Hong Kong did. A second wave of the disease hit those places after citizens were repatriated. Both of those places have re-instituted restrictions that they had recently relaxed.
At one point Japan and South Korea had the same level of infection, South Korea did massive amount of testing and tracing the contacts to keep the epidemics under control.
Japan succeeded by doing very little.
This makes me suspect that they actually had way higher number of infections and deaths but did not want to ruin the Olympics -- lots of money involved. Once the epidemics became global and the Olympics are off, there is no more reason to be creative... so they would let the numbers reveal the true picture... slowly.
The other country definitely involved in creative statistics is Turkey. About 3 weeks ago Turkey was surrounded by countries with infections and deaths ... huge number of cases in Iran on one side and growing in Greece on another in particular... but showed 0 infections. Reason? Tourism... again, serious money.
Has ANYONE in America ever been contacted to say they might have been exposed to the virus because they were at a certain location and asked to be tested?
From what I can see, this was the KEY in South Korea’s strategy and it sounds like Japan’s also. I haven’t seen ANY reports of this happening in the U.S.
It makes perfect sense. The biggest spread of the virus by far seems to come from these large events with a lot of people in close proximity to each other for hours at a time. It’s easy to locate and contact people who were at a specific event. You test them and get them treated or quarantined or self-quarantined and you’ve immediately contained the lion’s share of the exposed people. You’re also catching them early before they have symptoms and have had a chance to spread them.
The U.S. doesn’t seem to be attempting or at least succeeding in doing any kind of investigating to track down people who may have been exposed but don’t know it yet and get them tested.
Japan has strict societal customs that prevent diseases from spreading. It’s very different from U.S. culture in those ways. Try blowing your nose in a crowd there, and see what happens.
Japan’s excpetionalism isn’t, well exceptional
1. They wear masks at the best of time and gloves too. They’ve just stepped it up so that everyone wears one all the time
2. It is an extreme no-touch culture. No hugging, kissing, hand-shakes. It’s the anti-thesis of Italy and Spain
3. They are extreme in terms of hygiene, anti-septic etc.
But they have been taking this a bit lightly - Taiwan or Singapore is a better model to follow.
HOWEVER, that being said - what Taiwan or Singapore or Japan does is not transferrable to the USA - difference in culture and size render that not really a valid comparison. We can TRY what they did - and should - but it’ll never be a complete duplicate.
As to “lock downs don’t work” - that’s false.
1. China - Hubei - the lockdown limited it to Hubei, but that was AFTER the virus spread out. They’ve limited the spread since then
2. Rest of China - the lockdowns have worked. All the cases in March were tracked to Hubei.
3. Italy / Spain - they called for a lockdown but didn’t follow it. They went out, met and congregated, spreading the virus.
They get huge amounts of iodine in their diet
For your interest.
We cannot contain the outbreak.
We can only make sure it never gets so bad in a location that it overwhelms hospitals, and work hard for a good treatment.
So it is not a bad thing that Japan had a breakout of 100 cases, or that South KOrea is maintaining a steady 100 cases a day. That is controlled spread.
In places where we have locked down before there were any cases, we have just delayed the inevitable, at a horrendous cost. Even Andrew Cuomo now realizes that locking down an entire state because a county or city has a breakout doesn’t make a lot of sense. But we have locked down entire states that had fewer than 50 cases, meaning almost nobody has herd immunity.
We needed to be much smarter about when to lock down.
I would not be surprised if China has a hundred thousand deaths. They certainly didn’t have 3000 deaths. They cannot be trusted to provide any real numbers. There is no way they stopped the virus.
If you want a hint at whether lockdowns work, ask this question — why do places that ‘locked down too late’ keep saying that the rest of us are just weeks behind the same hell they are going through, when we locked down the same time they did?
Are they saying that the lockdown won’t make a difference?