Trump's ban on flights to and from China was highly effective in preventing the immediate and wholesale spread of COVID-19 to the United States, as happened in Italy. Now that the majority of new cases is occurring in Europe, our President has banned travel to and from there...and the Democrats can't stand the idea that he's doing something that's already proven to be effective in preventing the spread of the disease here.
So? They introduced legislation to take away his power to impose travel bans. Because they want as many Americans to get sick from this thing as possible, and--even better!--to die of it. Because that way they could actually win the election in November.
I've said and said and said that the transmission rate of this thing is the problem and what Trump is doing slows that way down. Without the ban on travel to and from China--which the Democrats were opposed to--we'd be in the same boat Italy is.
And hell yes the Democrats opposed it:
The thing is, there is a certain maximum amount of people that our medical system can care for at any one time. If we can keep the number of serious cases at or below that number, we can limit casualties and keep everyone healthy. But above that number, things go pear-shaped rather quickly. And in that case, the number of deaths far exceeds the number of deaths we get with containment.
And how do we get all those "serious" cases when 81% of infections are mild? Why, by making sure as many of them happen as possible--and the only way for that to happen is to get as many infected people inside the United States as possible. And that cannot happen if there is a travel ban in effect.
And so I stand by that characterization of this story: the Democrats want as many Americans as possible to be infected with COVID-19, because it gives them hope of winning the election in November. It's win-win for Democrats; they get more power and they can blame the outcome on Trump. To be sure, the press will uncritically report what they say about it, and never, never, ever ask, "Well, do you think that overturning the travel ban could have caused this?" Nope! 100% "We wanted to help the American people, but Donald Trump was just too bad a President. But President Biden will fix it!"
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...but now think about this: where will the virus spread the fastest and cause the most casualties? Places with densely-packed populations. Cities, in other words. If Democrats govern those cities the way they want Trump to govern right now, COVID-19 will spread through the entire population in no time, swamp the medical system, and kill a lot of people. Specifically, a lot of poor, inner-city people, the ones who typically vote Democrat. Probably not enough of them to change the balance very much, but it would also put an awful lot of disabled and elderly people into the ground. A sizable Democrat constituency would die of the thing; meanwhile out there in flyover country, transmission rates would be a lot lower, medical systems less stressed, and survival rates much higher.
But hell--get rid of Trump and win the election, and if the disease is still around they can declare a national emergency, declare martial law, take over, and then our fancy little republic turns into a communist dictatorship. Oh well.
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Yes, I think that's for the best. A muslim asshat declares that if the vaccine for COVID-19 comes from Israel, he won't have it.
In fact, I hope this attitude is universal among Jew-hating Muslims and that Israel is the first to create a successful Coronavirus vaccine.So say we all!
I want the Ayatollah to declare a fatwah against using the Israeli vaccine and to remind Muslims that they still need to go to Mosque and on Pilgrimage to Mecca and that Allah will protect them and if they do contract Coronavirus it's the will of Allah.
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YES the media is evil! You're only figuring that out now? "The media's hysteria about coronavirus is intended to destroy the American economy because media types are focused single-mindedly on defeating Trump."
A bad economy helps them do that, too. It's not either-or; it's and-and.
That article is full of good information, too, by the way, about conditions in China and Italy and why the illness is spreading so quickly. Air quality plays a big part of it.
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Not one country in the EU is helping Italy.
Italy's seeing a fatality rate just shy of 7%.
The other day I was talking about the fatality rate in the US, and was wrong on a couple of points.
There have been 39 coronavirus deaths in the US. Of those 39, 26 of them have been elderly people, over the age of 70 (not 80 as I said) and all from the same nursing home.
Okay? 1500 known cases, 39 deaths, that's 2.6%. But if we pare out those 26 nursing home deaths, that's 13 deaths over the entire rest of the country, and the death rate is then 0.9%.
We're going to find that a lot more people are infected than have been tested. That rate is going to drop.
Yes we need to contain it. No it's not the "superflu" that the media and the Democrats BIRM wish it were.
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Shifting gears now, 48 former IPCC members sing a different tune once their paychecks are no longer dependent on man-made global warming.
"Most of the extremist views about climate change have little or no scientific basis."
"There is clear cut solar-climate coupling and a very strong natural variability of climate on all historical time scales. Currently I hardly believe anymore that there is any relevant relationship between human CO2 emissions and climate change."
"No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected."
"The empirical evidence strongly indicates that the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is wrong."
And there are 42 more at the link. But the science is settled!!!
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Only got a couple pages added to AV last night, but that's more than got added the night before. I've got a bit of a problem.
My friends from junior high and high school who will recognize the name Roderick Jenkins probably will not remember who his girl was, particularly not after I got finished changing the spelling. I've long since forgotten her surname, so she became Sheryn Dykstra. Enlisted crew, she serves on a ship's flight deck as a maintenance and loading tech, and their paths cross many times during the course of his story (which is only written extremely badly in pencil and then in pen in some spiral-bound notebooks kept under lock and key and lock).
Anyway, Sheryn shows up in AV, but not until page 400...and immediately takes on a very important (even pivotal) role in how things are turning out.
That's fine if your story is 600 pages long. It's not too bad if your story is 500 pages long. But if this thing winds up the way I think it does, in under 60 pages from the current 409, then it's fuckin' bad indeed. Because deus ex machina is a bad way to make things happen.
It helps, to some very small extent, that what she's doing here is not saving the day. Rather than let the good guys have a good day, it's making their day almost not be a bad one. The battle which is still in progress is for all the marbles, so it's going to be hard-fought, and it's going to be massive.
...but the character setup for Sheryn just DOES NOT FIT anywhere in the prior storyline. There are a very few things I could crowbar in, here and there, to introduce the character earlier, but she literally does absolutely nothing for the story prior to page 400. She can't.
I'm going to go for it and see if I can pull it off. I'm not sure I can. And if I can't, I'll need to rethink how all this goes. But what the hell! That's what rough drafts are for, right?