Truth is I thought "Jem" posted your ideas and I was addressing him and his recent body of work. My mistake I disagreed with your post but my frustration was with "Jem".
You are again ignoring some fundamental facts : 1. I haven't brought up Sweden at all until today in passing. I have no real opinion on their approach. 2. I looked today their total death numbers ( pro rated ) are more then double that of Canada. So it appears on the surface that their approach was really bad initially leading to 3000+ extra deaths, but has improved since according to your data. 3. Canada's recent infection rates are exceptionally low relative to the US. 4. We are well into our opening up process. Some areas of the country have been for weeks already. Bottom line every area made their decisions and the consequences are what they are. We have thus far avoided the recent US chaos. You can believe we will experience it later, but I don't think that's likely, at least not nearly to the same extent anyways.
America’s told-you-so moment: How we botched the reopening The resurgence of Covid-19 was preventable, but the country’s rush to end shutdowns triggered disaster. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/01/coronavirus-reopening-347465?cid=apn States emerging from the coronavirus “stay at home” orders this spring had a road map to safety at their fingertips. Much of it was never put in place. Or it was largely ignored. And the alarming surge in coronavirus cases now spreading across the country is less a surprise than a tragically predictable national "I told you so" moment. “Every state was allowed to go off and do their own activities,” said Howard Koh, a senior public health official in the Obama administration who is now at Harvard. “And a lot of states opened up when the trends were going the wrong way.” To open safely, states needed vastly expanded testing. They needed contact tracing to identify and isolate people who had been exposed. They needed clear, consistent public health messaging and a coordinated national response, so that Americans could understand that even as economic activity resumes, life does not return to normal. And states needed to pay attention to the epidemiological data — diagnoses, positivity rates, hospital admissions, ICU capacity — that would tell them if their caseload was going down and staying down before taking the next step in gradually reopening. The framework included “gates,” or checkpoints that let a state know it was doing well in controlling the virus and could go on to the next phase. But the hierarchy of risk was put aside. Some states that initially avoided the worst effects of Covid-19 stampeded right through the gates, as President Donald Trump pushed them to revitalize the economy and offered inaccurate reassurances that the virus would “disappear” or “fade away.” Some Republican governors allied with Trump like Florida’s Ron DeSantis took victory laps, and the president himself tore into Democratic governors taking a more cautious approach. The current resurgence of Covid-19 cases — and most experts see this as a wave within a first wave, not the second wave that many fear will arrive in the fall — wasn’t inevitable. On an almost daily basis, health experts issued public warnings about the risk. By the time governors listened, cases were exploding. Florida, Texas, Arizona and southern California are particularly affected right now — but viruses readily cross state lines. “The numbers speak for themselves,” Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told a Senate committee this week. The count of deaths and illnesses in the weeks and months to come, he added, “is going to be very disturbing.” Other countries have endured coronavirus outbreaks “and gotten to the other side,” said Koh, who since leaving the Obama administration has divided his time between Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and its School of Public Health. “We need to prioritize — schools, child care, economic development,” said Natalie Dean, a biostatistician and public health expert at the University of Florida — a state that’s having one of the biggest surges right now. “But bars?” Indoor places like bars — where people are crowded together, not wearing masks, talking loudly and maybe not exercising their best judgment — have been identified as one way that younger adults are now getting infected in such large numbers. More than 2.5 million infections have been confirmed in the U.S., and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates the real number is 10 times that high. Doctors are only now beginning to grasp that some unknown percentage of patients will have lingering health problems — maybe permanent. Nearly 130,000 people in the U.S. have died. Earlier this spring, it looked like there might be a plan, a national blueprint that states could adapt to the pandemic’s unique reach and pace within its borders. The White House task force in mid-April laid out those gates so states could measure their progress and determine when they were ready to open one phase at a time. The approach was criticized at the time for lacking specifics — for instance, the White House document didn’t spell out how to arrange schoolchildren’s desks or where shopkeepers should put up plexiglass. But they gave a common framework, a scientifically based starting point for tiptoeing out of shutdowns as the virus was still widely circulating. And they were largely ignored. The White House task force stopped giving public briefings. States went their own ways. The big new public health message about face coverings or masks being essential to safely reopen got politicized. “The role of the CDC in coordinating the ‘gates’ response has not played as strong a role as many of us had expected,” said Dean, the Florida expert. “We of course want to resume things but we can’t resume everything at once.” Marta Wosińska, deputy director of policy at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy, told reporters on a briefing call Wednesday that the states hard hit early on, like New York, have more experience with the virus and are doing a better job keeping it in check now. After living through those difficult months, people in those states may also be more amenable to wearing masks and ongoing social distancing. But how fast states are reopening and how quickly they allowed riskier activities, like congregating in bars, has shaped the current crisis. “Red bells [are] going off,” Wosińska said. “The virus is really spreading and taking a good hold.” Although diagnostic testing has improved, in both capacity and accuracy, it’s not enough. Some areas seeing increased demand are having trouble keeping up, testing czar Brett Giroir said Wednesday. Commercial labs like Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp are reporting longer turnaround times to get results. Antibody tests, once thought to be the basis for “immunity passports” that would help guide who could return to work safely, have fallen short. The Food and Drug Administration sped them to market, but many turned out to be inaccurate. The FDA is addressing that now, but the real problem with antibody testing is science not policy. This is a complicated virus, and medical researchers just don’t understand yet how much protection against reinfection antibodies offer, or how long that might last. Contact tracing, which can’t keep up as wellonce a virus is spreading far and wide in a community, has fallen short. Here, too, there isn’t a federal approach; each state has developed its own system, and they don’t necessarily share information well. “There are a number of counties that are still doing this pen and pencil,” CDC director Robert Redfield told the Senate health committee Tuesday, acknowledging the gaps in the national public health data and infrastructure will mean turning to “broader community-based surveillance strategies.” For Koh, the current challenges, however worrisome, are not a surprise. “The virus is dictating what’s happening right now,” he said “We can’t ignore how serious this threat is. We have to stay both humble and aggressive.”
Is there a bigger idiot governing a state than DeCuntis? They should've tried their luck w/the druggie.
Well NYC has made some progress... New York City Reaches Milestone With No Reported Virus Deaths https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...aches-milestone-with-no-reported-virus-deaths Fatalities have receded slowly since daily peak of 597 City has slowed some of its opening plans out of caution New York City, once the epicenter of the nation’s coronavirus outbreak, has just reported its first day with zero confirmed or probable virus deaths since the pandemic hit New York State. The milestone came Sunday in initial data from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. It marked the end of a four-month stretch since the city reported its first Covid-19 fatality on March 11. The confirmed daily death count hit its height on April 7 at 597. Another 216 people were reported likely to have died from the virus despite no positive laboratory tests that day. “New Yorkers have been the hero of this story, going above and beyond to keep each other safe,” City Hall spokeswoman Avery Cohen said in an emailed statement. New York State reported five deaths statewide on Sunday but didn’t specify where those fatalities occured. The highest number of deaths statewide was reported on April 9, at 799. New York City has reported a total of 18,670 confirmed Covid-19 deaths and 4,613 probable ones. State and local data often conflict, and numbers can change due to delays in lab results, as some deaths initially reported as probable may be later changed to confirmed. On Saturday, an additional 341 people tested positive for Covid-19 in New York City, a rate of 1.3%, according to state data. The city kicked off its Phase Three of reopening on Monday, allowing nail salons, tanning studios and dog runs to open. Indoor dining in the city has been postponed indefinitely as other states, including Texas and Florida, have seen spikes in new cases after reopening bars and restaurants. “In the absence of national leadership, our city has stepped up to show what it means to reopen safely,” Cohen said. “With cases surging around the country, we know we can’t let our guard down just yet, and will continue to do everything we can to fight the virus together.” Washington D.C. has also seen coronavirus deaths slow this month. Figures released by the mayor’s office on Sunday showed no new deaths in the past three days. Overall U.S. deaths reported from Covid-19 were 134,904 as of Sunday, up 0.4% for the day.