So, its been a month and a half since my home state of California, along with most of the rest of the country, has been shut down due to COVID-19. It's been. . .interesting to work with a 2 year old in the house, to say the least. I've been lucky in that I can work from home - a good internet connection, Westlaw account, my cellphone, and a scanner (or support staff who can scan things), is all I need.
But for many of you out there, you're kind of fucked right now. If you think of all the industries that can't operate right now - music, hospitality, tourism, museums, retail shopping, sports, etc. - all multibillion dollar industries that are shut down. It's little wonder that we will probably have double-digit unemployment and a GDP contraction of 5%. In the meantime, everyone is wondering when this will end. And so-called "pro-life" politicians are advocating the deaths of upwards of hundreds of thousands of Americans (if not millions) in order to get the economy back on track.
But here's the thing that we all forget - this shelter-in-place order is meant to do two things. First, it's supposed to bend the curve so that our medical facilities don't get overburdened. California and Washington clamped down hard early, and the curve is bent the right way - we have relatively few deaths.* New York City, meanwhile, was slow and the draw to clamp down, and now has more deaths than anywhere else in the country - for now. And from historical accounts, we know that opening up too soon, which is what happened during the last pandemic one hundred years ago, only leads to even worse outbreaks. We need to stay put.
But the second reason we put shelter-in-place restrictions on was to buy time. Specifically, to buy time for the federal government to get its act together, or to get the fuck out of the way so state governments can step in. The goal here is to effectively put in place a test, trace, and treat regime to deal with COVID-19. Basically, we're all going to have to get tested - as unpleasant as the test looks - and tested, and tested. Anyone who tests positive immediately goes into quarantine, and the people they've been around get tested and quarantined. If they get sick in quarantine, they get treated. That's it. While Cheeto Jesus has been complaining about his news coverage, South Korea implemented this exact program - and keep in mind South Korea is a democracy, and is more densely populated than the U.S. - during the same timeline as we were supposed to, and although the U.S. and South Korea had their first infections of COVID-19 on the EXACT SAME FUCKING DAY, South Korea has had next to no new infections (4 yesterday, all from people who were foreign travelers), while we have over twenty thousand new cases today.
Current projections indicate that we need approximately 5 million tests done every single day for the next whenever in order to properly conduct test, trace, and treat. Rather than boost the product of tests and spread personal protective equipment (PPE) to medical facilities, our government has actually gone so far as confiscate PPE from states, hospitals, everyone. It's been a fucking mess. To give you an example, when the US Senate comes back from recess on Monday, they don't have enough tests for the Senators. They just plan to test "sick" Senators. When dealing with a disease that starts asymptomatic, that's felony stupid. And, I should note, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CAN'T SPARE 100 TESTS FOR US SENATORS WHEN WE NEED THE FEDS TO DEVELOP A TESTING PROTOCOL FOR 328 MILLION PEOPLE!!!!!
And that's why I'm writing this post - we are all pissed about being stuck at home. Trust me, I'm locked in with a two year old. A. TWO. YEAR. OLD. My wife and I have literally spent the past month as the snack bitches to our kids! It's awful, despite the fact that my sourdough game is on point now. But that isn't the fault of our governors. Many of them, Newsome included, are fucking TRYING to keep our dumb asses alive. No, your anger, your frustration, and your angry calls should be to Congress and the President. They're fucking this up, and have been from the start.
So stop marching on statehouses with your AR-15s, stop throwing pissyfits along the beach (Encintas and Pacific Beach), and focus that anger and energy on the people who have fucked this from the get-go.
Oh, and as far as where the virus came from - it doesn't matter. Look, it might matter in a few years, and on a historical note, it will be interesting to know, but right now, it doesn't matter. Your lawsuits against the PRC aren't going to amount to anything. Trust me, I am probably more happy to tilt at windmills than most attorneys and even I know that's a dumb idea for at least 6 different reasons.
One last thing: There's a current InfoWars video going around from two doctors in California, and it seems pretty clear that these guys are dead wrong on their conclusions. They cite to the fact that California has very few deaths, and then divide the total COVID-19 deaths in California by California's total population to argue that COVID-19 isn't all that deadly. I'm not a statistician, but even I know that's totally fucked up.
The key numbers are total infections and total hospitalizations. Because the number of hospital beds is basically fixed at just under 1,000,000, and approximately 2/3rds of all beds are filled with non-COVID-19 patients, we have around 300,000 beds nationwide for COVID-19 patients. When we go over that number in a region, the people who would normally survive from COVID-19 but need to be hospitalized will die. That's what's happening in NYC, and what happened in Italy (which had a 7.2% mortality rate). Additionally, because everything gets thrown at COVID-19, all the people who get sick from other shit (and other shit still exists) then have trouble getting treatment, especially when doctors and nurses are getting sick. So, in actuality, a disease which killed over 62,000 people in the past month in the US, is really fucking deadly. The reason why deaths in California are low is because we shut everything down on time.
