Posted on 03/16/2020 4:13:06 AM PDT by EyesOfTX
Why, in my day, we didn’t have things like schools and restaurants and food supply chains. – While “coronavirus” is a term that you and everyone you know has become intimately familiar with, to the two tired old Last Geezers Standing in the Democrat presidential field, it remains a mystery. In their spooky debate last night – which felt like a post-apocalyptic contest between two addled zombie hunters – Sleepy Creepy Uncle Quid Pro Joe referred to COVID-19 as “SARS”, while The Commie labled it “ebola.”
Biden also referred to the “H1N1” virus that killed more than 60,000 Americans on his own watch as Vice President as the “N1H1” – which showed how seriously he took it at the time – and called ebola “that thing that happened in Africa.” All in all, though, none of that and the other Biden gaffes on the night will be enough for Sanders, as the nation’s Unfrozen Caveman Senator held things together just enough to make his eventual nomination all but a certainty at this point.
Here’s the way the liberal hacks at Politico put it:
News-wise, there were two important takeaways. The first is that Biden did nothing to raise any fresh doubts about his electability. He was coherent, in control of his arguments in a way that he isn’t always, and aggressive enough against Sanders to keep the Vermont senator, who is rightfully respected as an excellent debater, on defense frequently. Sanders’ best hope was some kind of asteroid-like event that caused Biden to buckle on stage. It didn’t happen.
Yes, friends and family, Bernie Sanders, a man who looks and sounds like a cartoon character voiced by Mel Blanc and whose leftist ideas would make Vladimir Lenin blush, is now being portrayed by corrupt Democrat media toadies as “an excellent debater” as a means of propping up Quid Pro Joe in the public’s collective mind. Basically, because Biden managed to remain standing and remembered where he was for two hours, he’s the “winner” according to the Democrat/media propaganda machine.
Interestingly, despite Biden’s prior insistence that he and The Commie be seated for this debate, the format was changed at the last minute in order to make it coronavirus-compliant. The two grumpy old men stood a podiums carefully spaced 6 feet apart so they wouldn’t breathe on each other, but they couldn’t resist greeting one another with an elbow bump that was eerily reminiscent of a scene from “Grumpy Old Men.”
Debate in the time of coronavirus: An elbow bump greeting for Biden and Sanders | News | WTAQ
Happy Birthday Jack Lemmon!
It was nice that the two could get together for one last on-stage game of political canasta before Biden wipes the floor with Sanders in tomorrow’s primaries in Florida, Arizona, Ohio and Illinois and the DNC cancels the remainder of the campaign and summarily declares Quid Pro Joe its winner. Because that’s what’s about to happen over the course of the next two days.
With governors in major population states like California, New York, Ohio and Illinois now ordering the shutdown of bars and restaurants, and the CDC issuing an advisory discouraging any gathering of more than 50 people, coronavirus is, like it or not, turning America into your basic police state and shutting down our entire economy for at least the coming few weeks. Make no mistake about it: The actions of those four governors will soon be emulated by the governors in other states as the herd mentality takes over. These are politicians after all, and none of them will want to become a media target for straying from the coronavirus stampede.
While discouraging public gatherings and encouraging people to remain shut in their homes are moves that make sense in terms of trying to contain the spread of the virus, we must also recognize that these moves will now put massive more stress on grocery stores and the nation’s food supply chains that are already finding it impossible to meet stampeding consumer demand. Restaurants provide 35-50% of the daily meals serves in this country, and limiting them to drive-thru only or delivery isn’t going to do the trick.
We will soon be seeing lines at fast-food drive-thru windows that look like the gas lines we witnessed during the oil shocks of the 1970s, and the first guy who runs out of gas – or the electric charge in his Tesla – while waiting for hours in a line will cause it to back up for miles. If you think the shelves at your local CostCo or Albertsons have been empty over the past week, just wait till you see what happens to them when everyone rushes to the store to stock up on the stuff they need to cook their hamburgers and fried chicken at home, like your mom used to do.
Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York suggested on Sunday that the President might want to “activate the army” to help in dealing with the impacts of the coronavirus. This prompted many, including myself, to joke about Cuomo’s apparent expectation that the military can just shoot or nuke the virus.
But the reality – which he did not detail for the media – is that Cuomo knows that the actions he and his fellow governors took over the weekend are very likely to cause major disruption in food supply chains, a consequence that would inevitably lead to social unrest. That’s why he wants to have the army available to him – he’s anticipating the potential need to declare martial law.
Thus, the coronavirus and the measures being taken by the state and federal governments to deal with it, are about to provide the DNC with all the justification it needs for doing what the old Clinton freak James Carville advocated four days ago: “Let’s shut this puppy down and let’s move on and worry about November. This thing is decided. There’s no reason to keep it going, not even a day longer,” he said.
Expect the puppy to be shut down come Wednesday.
That is all.
The 60,000 figure seems to be an overestimate.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-flu-usa-idUSN1223579720100212
Add Washington state to the list of shutdowns. What Mao, Hitler or Stalin couldn’t accomplish, Chicken Little will.
Total social unrest and breakdown....right before an election.
Typical way to vote your nation into the abyss.
Chicken Little with the full force of the media behind her.
Trump should release an EO stating that these measures cannot be implemented until such time that certain national death toll threshold has been met, say....100,000 deaths.
We may have to delay the election. (Until after RBG croaks). Never let a crisis go to waste.
It would be interesting to run some estimates. How many hospitals do we have? Say 60,000 give or take? With almost a million beds. How many “blue people” per hour can a hospital manage and still function? 6? 60? I’m guessing no American hospital can continue to function with one blue patient per minute. Let’s take half that because I know of many hospitals that couldn’t handle one an hour. 30 times 60,000 is what? 1.8 million? We can probably handle 100,000 new cases of seriously ill people a day but somewhere between that number and multiples of that number there could be massive social dislocation.
It’s like piloting a star ship. You have to look out the back window to obtain navigational data. We won’t know what any of the real numbers are until we see what the death count is in three weeks. Let’s hope we can keep the “new cases per day” of really ill people South of 10,000. I don’t pretend to know and all my numbers are just made up but I don’t see anybody having this discussion.
Everybody touts our heath system as the best in the universe but nobody is willing to find out if this is true. Let’s sit back and watch it in action.
A good analogy is a Diesel engine in a commercial setting. If you keep the RPMs down the maintenance schedule is less expensive. If you have to run the hospital at “140% of recommended RPMs” the “maintenance costs” are going to go up rapidly. The next month or two are going to be fascinating. Historians will argue for decades.
Testing is the key to improvement.
Or martial law to prevent it. My bet is that martial law is imminent by my conversations with military reservists who are getting called up.
When you order a test you have to first ask “Why?” And then, “How will the answer change management?” Testing could potentially give data but with testing there are “Alpha errors” and “Beta errors”. Death is a “hard fact”. There are no “false” positives or negatives. Sure, testing gives us a better idea of “where the virus is now” but the death rate is just a week or so behind that and the data is irrefutable.
The Roche announcement seemed to have the promise of greatly increasing the testing possible.
I’m not talking about testing people, I’m talking about testing systems...the US healthcare system in particular.
So i would argue testing doesn’t mean much and does little to help make decisions. But I have spent decades wrestling with the complexities of “testing asymptomatic people”. In reality the “helpful” part of “testing” is going to be at autopsies.
Yup. Bars, restaurants and gyms now. Beautiful place to live, but it is chock a block with fascists ghouls.
Oh, our systems will be tested alright. Even under the rosiest of scenarios the next couple months are gonna be hell for people who work in hospitals.
You are right that 60,000 is high but after 10 years the CDC still deals in ranges with 12,000 the midpoint. They really don’t know how many died with the top figure being 18,800. I’m betting we won’t reach that with 19.
And H1N1 is still with us as part of the annual flu. It is 50-60% of the flu cases and probably kills about the same as it did in 2009-2010.
That was were my thinking was.
We closed everything to spread out the infection rate to not overwhelm the Hospital system. If Hospitals get overwhelmed, death rate goes up by ~10X. Appears maybe based on # of sick, that we got a jump on that maybe.
So based on infection positive, sick & dead, rates - WHEN DOES the SHTF? 3 weeks???
When does the ALL CLEAR sound and we go back to normal - 2 months??
Is hot summer weather what we need? As this becomes a super infectious late Flu season?
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