quote:

Originally posted by stoic-one:
We've been operating on this premise since the very beginning da rona...

That's being charitable. It would likely be more accurate to substitute "wild speculation" for "empirical evidence".

quote:

Originally posted by wcb6092:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/ar...like-it-s-paying-off

[...]

So why isn’t Sweden changing tack in the fight against the pandemic? ‘The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance’, wrote Albert Camus in The Plague – a book that eerily depicts the suffering of the human condition when a disease sweeps through society. And lately, scientists and observers have ventured that explanation publicly: perhaps Sweden’s refusal to fall into line is because Tegnell and his team are a bunch of philistines?

A group of 22 scientists made that charge in an op-ed last week in Dagens Nyheter, appealing to the government to rein in supposedly ignorant officials at the Public Health Agency. Last week, a piece in the Daily Telegraph ran with the same theme and expanded it to include much of the national population: Swedes have willingly been duped by ignorant authorities and a chief epidemiologist who has been seduced by his own sudden fame. [...]

Seems there's people having issues with "the country being run by scientists" everywhere, no matter what the official approach.

While the debate isn't anywhere near as much politicized as in the US over here in Germany, the state of farspread unamity was officially ended this week in a parliamentary debate. It's not like there weren't degrees of different approaches before, mostly between the states; while for the first weeks it used to be a competition for the hardest restrictions, it now seems to turn into one for the fastest lifting of them as people start to get fed up. It's not something following party lines, or even camps within parties though.

As I noted in the Merkel succession thread, the state minister presidents of Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia have been at opposite ends of the issue with a possible eye on becoming the conservative candidate for the next chancellorship; Bavarian Markus Söder driving the tough line, Armin Laschet of NRW the easy one. Laschet is generally considered to be a liberal ally of Angela Merkel in the Christian Democratic Union, but in this case the chancellor has been calling for caution in lifting restrictions, so as not to endanger the success in bringing cases down so far. Which got her unusual praise from Bavaria by Söder, who also cited his colleague from neighboring Baden-Württemberg - Winfried Kretschmann, the only Green among the German state minister presidents - as part of a "community of the prudent"; both noting that the southern states have been hit hardest by COVID, and stressing a common line.

OTOH Kretschmann's state minister of economy, Nicole Hoffmeister-Kraut of the CDU, has been pushing for the lifting of restrictions, as has been Boris Palmer, mayor of Tübingen, BW, considered somewhat of a right-wing Green if there's such a thing. When Merkel criticized "opening debate orgies" with a look at some states last weekend in a video-conference of the CDU executive board, it promptly got leaked to the media - probably by the Laschet camp - where it caused considerable indignation and made her clarify she was not seeking to stifle debate. The CDU's junior partners in the national coalition government, the Social Democrats, have their own internal debates. Just yesterday Bremen lord mayor Andreas Bovenschulte criticized some states announcing to permit religious services again, while similarly SPD-led Rhineland-Palatinate was one of the targets of Merkel's recent complaint about talking too much of opening up. Etc.

For now, daily number of new infections is still dropping - first time on a Friday, actually - despite epidemiologists warning that we might see an effect of people ignoring restrictions on Easter this weekend. Overall though, farspread personal precaution like increased mask-wearing (mandatory on public transport and/or while shopping depending upon state from next week) seems to continue the downward trend. Active cases are now down to 58 percent from the peak on 6 April; not quite as good as Switzerland with 43, Austria with 29 and South Korea with 27, but encouraging. We're also seeing advertizing pick back up at the company, though still far from normal levels. About a third of what we usually need this week, but five weeks ago it was essentially zero. Experts are still warning of a second wave, but with expanded national ICU capacities, we could sustain about 20,000 new cases per day - about three times of what we had at the peak so far.

Georgia members - please post experiences with relaxed restrictions (obviously just started).

Georgia Relaxing Coronavirus Restrictions Starting Friday 4-21-20

quote:

Originally posted by f2:
Georgia members - please post experiences with relaxed restrictions (obviously just started).

Georgia Relaxing Coronavirus Restrictions Starting Friday 4-21-20

Not much has changed. Restaurants can’t open their dining areas until Monday. All of the ones that I regularly use have already said they will not be opening their dining areas Monday and will still only be open for take-out. A lot of gyms and other places did open yesterday. I wouldn’t be surprised if not many people are going to the gyms out of fear. Same with hair salons.

It’s been funny reading the national news sites (and Atlanta news stations) and their hand wringing over Georgia the last few days when the death rate nationwide over this is .00015. And that’s including the inflated number of deaths that we all know is a lie.

https://hotair.com/archives/ja...ndor-just-went-dark/

Earlier this week we looked at the major snafu going on in Michigan, where Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s administration awarded a lucrative contract to one of her campaign’s vendors to trace coronavirus cases. The contract was given to Great Lakes Community Engagement, who was set to turn the work over to long-time Democratic consultant Mike Kolehouse.

After alarm bells started going off over the idea of such a liberal outfit collecting that amount of personal data about Michigan voters, the contract was canceled.

Whitmer is claiming that she has no idea how Kolehouse ended up with that sweet arrangement

Originally, we heard that Whitmer’s administration cooked up the idea. But Whitmer denied that and suggested that the decision to award the contract to Kolehouse’s outfit was made by the State Emergency Operations Center.

But they almost immediately denied the claim, saying they had never approved the vendor

Now the finger is pointing at the state Health Department, who doesn’t seem inclined to comment on it thus far.

Couldn’t we just clear all this up by asking Kolehouse himself? That’s going to be a lot harder than you might think at first because he’s basically deleted his entire online presence in a matter of 48 hours.

If you look for the website of his company (the one that was about to pocket nearly $200,000 from this deal) you’ll get a 404 error. The entire website is gone. He also wiped out his social media accounts and is not answering emails.

^^^ The people of Michigan need to run Whitmer out on a rail.

And not one word about it in the local news. I first heard about it from somebody that is out of state

quote:

Originally posted by Pipe Smoker:
If true, good news for me!

“French researchers are planning to trial whether nicotine patches will help prevent - or lessen the effects of - the deadly coronavirus.

Evidence is beginning to show the proportion of smokers infected with coronavirus is much lower than the rates in the general population.

Scientists are now questioning whether nicotine could stop the virus from infecting cells, or if it may prevent the immune system overreacting to the infection.”

https://mol.im/a/8246939

I'm taking extra precautions.

quote:

Originally posted by Rightwire:
And not one word about it in the local news. I first heard about it from somebody that is out of state

Tucker Carlson reported on it this week, though.

It's the greatest fleecing of America in History. $5,000,000,000,000 gone. What did it do? What did we get for it? Next week we'll have to print another $5 Trillion Dollars.

Millions Of Now-Unemployed Americans Are Making More Money Than They Did When Working

More than 26 million Americans have filed new claims for unemployment benefits in recent weeks, and a lot of them will now be bringing home much more money than they did while they were actually working. Needless to say, this is going to create a perverse incentive for people to stay unemployed for as long as possible. Just think about this for a moment. If you could earn more money sitting on your sofa gobbling down chips and watching Netflix, what possible motivation would you have to go back to work? Many low paid workers are going to want to ride this gravy train all the way to the end, and as you will see below, this is already causing big problems for businesses all across America.

So how did we get to this point?

Well, the Democrats pushed extremely hard to get a provision into the CARES Act that would give unemployed workers an additional $600 a week on top of any normal unemployment benefits. The following comes from USA Today…

The CARES Act includes a $600-a-week bonus until July 31 for those registered as unemployed. The $600 is issued in addition to the standard unemployment benefit, which varies by state and by individuals’ record of previous earnings.

This means that for the next several months, unemployed workers all over America will be bringing home at least the equivalent of $15 an hour based on a 40 hour work week, and some Republican members of Congress were very concerned about this…

Some Republican lawmakers warned about this unintended consequence of the relief bill when it was being drafted, noting that $600 a week amounts to $15 an hour, more than twice the federal minimum wage. That’s in addition to state unemployment benefits, which vary widely, from a maximum of $235 per week in Mississippi to $795 per week in Massachusetts.

Despite those concerns, the CARES Act easily sailed through both chambers of Congress, and now we are stuck with it.

If it was just a small percentage of workers that were being overpaid not to work, we could certainly live with that on a temporary basis.

But according to one study, more than 42 percent of all workers made less than $15 an hour in 2015…

According to a report by the Leadership Conference Fund and the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality, 42.4% of people working in the United States in 2015 earned less than $15 an hour.

So how is the economy supposed to “get back to normal” if more than 40 percent of our workers would be better off unemployed?

https://www.zerohedge.com/pers...hey-did-when-working

And now the scientifically incompetent and overly politicized WHO is saying there is "no evidence" that Wuhan Fly antibodies make people immune to reinfection.

https://www.reuters.com/articl...ed-who-idUSKCN2270FB

Yeah, they aren't trying to string this out for political reasons...

There is no evidence that reinfection can occur, but there is evidence that China's and WHO's test kits are defective and wrong half of the time.

April 25, 2020
'The Pretense of Knowledge' has Cost America Dearly

Recently, Brit Hume, the sober and understated Fox News commentator, voiced the thoughts of millions when he said,

“I think its time to consider the possibility… that this lockdown, as opposed to the more moderate mitigation efforts… is a colossal public policy calamity.”

The financial extent of the calamity was quantified by economist Scott Grannis when he observed that “almost overnight, we have wiped out all the net job gains of the past 14 years.” He made that comment on April 12 and the losses aren’t over yet. Grannis bluntly concluded that, “The shutdown of the U.S. economy will prove to be the most expensive self-inflicted injury in the history of mankind.”

The loss of liberty incurred as a result of shutdown is not as easily quantifiable, but is no less significant.

Epidemiological “models” have provided the scientific basis for this large-scale abrogation of personal and economic liberty. Now that the models have been shown to be grossly inaccurate, some are demanding accountability.

In a recent op-ed, Georgia congressman Jody Hice wrote:

“Public health experts, scientists, and government officials all warned that millions would die unless strict measures were put in place… So, we willingly took unprecedented steps to save the most vulnerable among us, even at the cost of wreaking unparalleled economic damage. The experts said it was necessary, that the coronavirus was especially deadly, and our medical systems were in danger of being overwhelmed… Now, weeks into the pandemic, the dire outcomes foretold by experts have failed to come to pass. The models used to justify the closure of society have been shown to be wildly inaccurate… We need to examine why the models failed us, why their creators have been so far off the mark, and why these projections were used to justify policies that have resulted in unparalleled economic disruption.”

It is worth having that discussion. In retrospect, and despite their air of authority, the experts never had enough knowledge about this virus to make reliable calculations about the future.

But the real problem with the models weren’t that they proved to be false, but rather that they were promoted with false certitude.

“I confess that I prefer true but imperfect knowledge,” economist Friedrich Hayek once said, “to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.”

Hayek’s remark, given as he was accepting the Nobel Prize in 1974, was that thinking of economics as a “science” might lead to “a pretense of knowledge,” the idea that any one person might know enough to engineer society successfully, unmindful of unintended consequences.

But Hayek went on to note that his reasoning applied to the physical sciences as well:

“There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, ‘dizzy with success’… to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society--a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”

These observations, made over 40 years ago, look prescient today.

How might we have acted if the models didn’t exist? Most likely, we would have chosen a more traditional approach to fighting the pandemic: quarantine and protect the sick and vulnerable, institute some sensible mitigation policies, and otherwise get on with life.

This is essentially the approach Sweden has chosen, and for which it has been pilloried in the American media. Yet, Sweden’s policies are based on thinking that is quintessentially American.

In an article in the UK Spectator, Fredrik Erixon, the director of the European Centre for International Political Economy in Brussels, explained that,

“We worry about Covid-19 a lot. Many people work from home. Restaurants are open, but not bustling. Keeping two metres apart at bus stops is something Swedes were pretty good at before the crisis: we don’t need much encouragement now. We’re careful. But our approach to fighting the pandemic starts from something more fundamental: in a liberal democracy you have to convince and not command people into action. If you lose that principle, you will lose your soul.”

So far, the Swedish strategy of allowing some exposure to the virus in order to build immunity among the general population while protecting high-risk groups like the elderly appears to be paying off. The country’s chief epidemiologist reported that “herd immunity” could be reached in the capital of Stockholm in a matter of weeks. Moreover, Sweden has achieved this while taking less of an economic hit than other countries in Europe.

Sweden’s approach was a mixture of epidemiology and principle. Erixon noted that the concept of a national lockdown is “deeply illiberal -- and, until now, untested.”

He allowed that Sweden may change if facts warrant. “But,” he wrote, “the vast majority, for now, want Sweden to keep its cool. We don’t want to remember 2020 as the time when we caused irreparable harm to our liberties -- or lost them entirely.”

Sweden instructing the U.S. on liberty. Who would have thought?

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.co...y.html#ixzz6Kdr53KZc

quote:

So how is the economy supposed to “get back to normal” if more than 40 percent of our workers would be better off unemployed?

Normal unemployment benefits are paid for a set length of time, so aren't these as well? Also there is a usual condition that one must be actively seeking a job but I can see how that part might be waived at the moment.

quote:

Originally posted by tleo205:
Normal unemployment benefits are paid for a set length of time, so aren't these as well?

From the article:

quote:

The CARES Act includes a $600-a-week bonus until July 31 for those registered as unemployed. The $600 is issued in addition to the standard unemployment benefit, which varies by state and by individuals’ record of previous earnings.

This means that for the next several months, unemployed workers all over America will be bringing home at least the equivalent of $15 an hour based on a 40 hour work week.

In Michigan a worker making 400.00 a week draws 185.00 in Workers Comp.Add the 600.00 and it gives them a double check every week.

It's an end around to $15 minimum wage.

$700/40hr =$17.50 per hour

If they normally only worked 32 hours = $21.88 per hour.

Who going to want to go back to work? The cashier I always talk to said her husband is loving it. He's making more than he did at work and has no intention of returning until he runs out of benefits.

Complete windfall for fast food workers, restaurant workers, and cashiers.

quote:

Originally posted by feersum dreadnaught:
We fought a revolution during a smallpox epidemic.

With a 30-40% rate of death for those of a European background and damn near 100% for the Native American population.