Former vice president, current presidential candidate, now presumptive democratic nominee Biden was right single payer healthcare is had in Italy, throughout Europe and it didn’t help; indicating Medicare for all would do very little to combat the enormity of a pandemic in the U.S. Similarly yes other countries are providing UBI (universal basic income), guaranteeing a majority of people’s employment wages, merely furloughing workers not firing them; yet, the question isn’t can they do it, but how long they can do it without looking like failures such as Greece amidst its financial crisis.

Current Trends by Natasha Sapp

Absolutely there are a thousand and one things president Trump could have done to make the COVID 19 pandemic less impactful on all aspects of America from numbers of people infected, sick, spreading the virus, dying from it, to the economic ripple effects, skillfully handling the shutdown of non-essential businesses and being sure people had income to buy necessary items like food, finally putting us on the surest footing for when we come out on the other side of this. And without question his viewed slow response and the meager steps taken thus far has been one abysmal, catastrophic failure after another which will ultimately cost lives and for which he should be impeached once the crisis has passed for dereliction of his office. Basic examples like from the moment he was sworn in not firing the pandemic response team established under the Obama administration to manage the Ebola epidemic thought to come to America in 2014, who were to stay on in a permanent government position, providing no replacement. To not throwing out/ignoring the pandemic response playbook both the Obama administration and the response team created based on that crisis handed over to Trump’s administration when they came into office circa 2017; not at the same time cutting funding to the CDC (centers for disease control) and the NIH (national institutes of health) directly negatively impacting both preparedness for an epidemic/pandemic and slowing down investigative research into emerging disease threats in terms of treatments or vaccines, not blowing off further evidence vis-à-vis the military assessments and the epidemic drill demonstrating we weren’t ready to handle anything a fraction of what we are currently experiencing and slated to experience before this is anywhere near over. Not ignoring U.S. intelligence agency information dating back to November 2019, the earliest known information warning about the new virus, or ignoring critical intel presented in the presidential daily briefings dating back to December; not firing the epidemiologist stationed in China whose job it was to be on the lookout for epidemics and pandemic beginnings, there on America’s behalf because it is a known hotspot for such things, then complaining U.S. specialists were not allowed in the country to properly investigate what was taking/took place in Wuhan province surrounding the wet market the virus was traced to or whatever its origins. How about keeping up maintenance on the ventilators in the national stockpile so that if something calamitous happened they were ready for use or perhaps to lend to other stricken nations as we have done in the past when they needed help, seeming to think it was too expensive and unnecessary, why it was halted under our 45th president’s watch; result states sent hundreds of broken ventilators and dry rotted masks. Once informed of the potential of the corona virus landing on U.S. soil why not at least convene appropriate staff to find out what would be needed in the case of an epidemic/pandemic, the type of respiratory illness long predicted by epidemiologists down to persons like Bill Gates circa 2015 for doctors, hospitals, employees who would be essential workers, inventory the national stockpile to see what’s available versus what’s needed, reach out to hospitals and determine what they have, what they need and by no later than say January 20 when the first case was reported, discreetly meeting with major manufacturing entities in America for the needed supplies and saying I need you to ramp up production of these items by 50% in case this does happen. Lining up plans and ideas of who they would appoint as a sort of virus czar to coordinate the handling of virus response whether that’s communicating with the American people or managing the logistics of getting required supplies and resources to areas around the country, perhaps appointing 2 different persons to 2 separate positions, ensuring the competence of those put in said positions as opposed to Trump’s usual want of hiring people he knows, giving his usual cadre of cohorts more responsibility how son in-aw Jared Kushner ended up with a task portfolio to include brokering final Middle East peace and we ended up with Mike Pence head of the COVID 19 taskforce; for a refresher course, the former governor of Indiana who not only oversaw draconian anti-abortion laws and rules in the state, thanks to his Christian fundamentalist faith but, more related to our current topic, delayed a needle exchange program to curb an HIV outbreak there because he wanted to pray about it, delay leading to significantly more infections. Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner who apparently had a part of the taskforce’s duties piled onto his already ridiculously full plate and advised the president not to order more masks because such an order would spook the stock market. Nationalizing healthcare supply chains and appointing a coordinator that would have stopped the individual state bidding wars for critical supplies needed first and foremost by healthcare workers but also, as we soon discovered, bus drivers, grocery store employees, delivery drivers, the PPE (personal protective equipment in the form of masks, disposable gowns, gloves, face shields, goggles) that never got to nursing homes, long term care facilities, mental institutions, prisons, we would later find out virtual petri dishes for the virus. Nationalization that would have potentially saved lives when the military had ventilators and supplies it could lend to desperate hospitals in overwhelmed cities but there was no one to tell them where to send it. No later than early February fully invoking the defense production act to manufacture mass quantities of items known as PPE not the half measure he did with meat packing plants resulting in making people sick and forcing them to choose between their job and their health or the deal with GM that did mean required ventilators but certainly not as cost effectively as possible and again not only didn’t they have anyone to contact telling them where to send them when completed, but also there was the turnaround time to refit designated car factories into a space that could fabricate all the pieces of something as complex as a ventilator, actions that should have been undertaken months before to be effective. Basic crisis management congruent to the situation halting export of desperately needed PPE, medical supplies slated to fill orders made by other countries, China able to get a portion of our ventilator supply simply because they ordered and received it before anyone thought to cancel mentioned outgoing exports. When paying for critical supplies slated for frontline workers or ordinary citizens alike researching to find reputable companies not farming out such fundamental work to cronies and CEO’s who made donations to Trump’s campaign mirroring what happened with Porto Rico recovery and the tiny electrical company with a handful of employees given a hideously expensive contract to rebuild the US territory’s previous failing then utterly destroyed power grid, the millions paid for test tubes only to be given mini soda bottles instead and not in the early days of the pandemic when everyone everywhere was scrambling for everything, this story was reported on at the end of June this year. Speaking of cronyism and interference not doing whatever Trump did on 2 fronts at the CDC A- somehow causing the failure to create a usable, working corona virus test that means still to this day not having effective testing in large enough quantities to test even the most essential persons who need regular screening to prevent spread i.e. healthcare workers, grocery store employees, delivery personnel, various food handlers to farm workers, via Trump appointee infighting it seems and B- not installing whatever lackey is responsible for the mealy-mouthed CDC directions for the meatpacking plant suffering a substantial outbreak as detailed by Rachel Maddow, her show trying to get to the bottom of what suddenly changed at the CDC. Nationalizing temporally or partially nationalizing the pharmaceuticals found to provide some treatment of the virus, think Remdesivir the Ebola drug that appears more useful against corona virus or the common, inexpensive steroid in use throughout the medical community but that there is now a run on to treat the 2 million quickly turned 3 million plus, 5 million and counting US positive cases, a growing number ill enough to require medication intervention not singularly breathing support and ventilators; still to that end the sedation and paralytic drugs used to place someone of a ventilator and keep them under and unable to injure themselves while on it that can run low in overwhelmed or small hospitals. The initial run on hydroxychloroquine and Chloroquine when preliminary research showed promise; meaning suddenly it was less available to places regularly inundated with malaria, lupus patients who had trouble getting their prescribed medication, the 2 uses for which the drug has full FDA approval. Nationalizing, or doing something to stabilize perishable food supplies once slated for restaurants and food services now brought to an almost stand still to prevent farmers throwing away spoiling milk, rotting produce as lines at food pantries grew astronomically while people suddenly found themselves jobless and struggling to put food on their tables, some for the first time in their lives; sending out a plea to the American people for ideas, volunteer hands, providing backing to those showing proven promise to deliver. At any point during the crisis from January’s first case to now doing any of the things listed here picking up and actually following the pandemic playbook, appointing a competent person to coordinate the supply chain and distribution of medical supplies, listening to the infectious disease doctors you brought into the administration Fauci and Birx and following their direction, adhering to the CDC guidelines on how to reopen cities, counties, finally states slowly and safely, equally as important when not to; now with reopening schools how to do so safely not blustering with threats to withhold funding if they don’t when what they need is more federal dollars for needed changes and the way our government works schools are under local control making it their jurisdictional decision when they open or not. From a messaging standpoint not downplaying the severity of the virus calling it 15 people coming in from China, soon it would go away achieved with small tweaks to what he said saying things like right now it’s 15 people coming in from China we’ll see if it gets worse; stating that other viruses in this family seem to dissipate with warmer weather we’ll have to see if the current one does too but be prepared if it doesn’t since it is so new. Telling people that while the symptoms may start out mimicking the flu it is not, in fact is far more deadly based on what happened in China. All that being said, needing to be pushed back against is this growing notion that America is the only developed/westernized nation who can’t get its act together in terms of a COVID 19 response from Katy Kay on MSNBC’s Morning Joe April 6th relating her European friends reaction not just to America’s lack of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers, lack of ventilators, ICU beds, such weak testing but to the lack of a national stay at home order, flabbergasted people were still allowed to go out into parks, are freely going to the supermarket sans masks, religious services are still happening in large groups within states either with no stay at home order or that has exempted said services from the order calling it an amateur operation. Obviously either ignoring or unaware of the Italian mayor who seemed to violate social distancing rules to yell at 2 people in a park area using the ping pong table, never mind they seemed to be the only 2 persons well within the social distancing perimeter guidelines we’re told we need to follow, not to be outdone by the ones recording television messages complete with expletives asking where the F- people were going and chastising people for using a type of mobile hair dresser that had cropped up shouting who would see them if they were dead and in a casket; how about the man in Spain ticketed for using a stuffed dog to manipulate the pet walking exception in order to get out of his home, be outside. The UK policeman using a megaphone telling people to stop lounging, sunbathing in a park shouting it was a lockdown not a holiday, their word for vacation, additional video of police on motorcycles, in vans patrolling through a park trying to chase off and disperse citizens; fast forward to June and the scene of a crowded beach with captions on wondering why virus spread was so hard to control was a scene from a UK beach not an American one (though to be fair we have our share as well), bars too, the UK’s filled with soccer fans celebrating a victory no masks, and social distancing what social distancing. Simultaneously America’s choice to open bars and restaurants was economic in origin, goal to try and save teetering on the brink businesses not singularly wanton hedonism. Ignorant of the fines issued in France to people who were out absent the newly necessary paperwork, sufficient reason to be out and Paris who had to ban daytime outdoor exercise to maintain the lockdown, Emmanuel Macron also criticized for his slow response, his downplaying of the virus’ severity, not ceasing to shake hands parallel to Britain’s Boris Johnson who didn’t display the desired level of seriousness until he contracted the virus and ended up in the ICU, the woman in a UK hospital talking about a lack of knowledge by doctors and a lack of PPE (personal protective equipment) like masks, face shields, gloves, disposable gowns, but America is the country who can’t get its act together. A UK man is the one who spit on a transit worker over some dispute, her later dying of COVID, another example of not taking the virus seriously; real culprit, her employer who knew about her medical conditions yet put her in a front facing, interacting with the public position anyway, but America is the country run by big corporations and profit first motives to the exclusion of all else particularly safety of workers- if you say so. Quebec Canada had similar PPE procurement problems and, contrary to the picture being painted, there is a global mask, PPE shortage not merely an American one prompting a woman in Belgium with health issues to sew masks for her small nation, preceding many top fashion designers doing so for their native countries; shortages exacerbated for a time by lockdowns in places like Malaysia where factories that make gloves constituting a majority of the world’s supply were operating at 50% due to lockdown procedures there. Yet America is the problem independent Japan and their cherry blossom festivities going on as if it were any given Tuesday and when states of emergency were announced Japanese president assuring they would look nothing like other parts of Asia, parts of Europe, New Zealand’s prime minister known for their strict lockdown procedures and praised for successfully suppressing the virus currently but who also deemed the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy essential. Telling news reporters she did a little dance when her country’s cases went down to zero only to have 2 sisters let out of quarantine on compassionate grounds to visit a dying friend sans ever being tested for the virus which each had. Every western nation’s nursing homes, long term care facilities have been unadulterated breeding grounds for the virus including our own, Spain and France as well as Italy’s death tolls substantially increasing upon added deaths in care facilities attributed to the virus; meat packing plants the same in the United States but in Germany it prompted a neighborhood lockdown when one of theirs lead to a cluster of cases yet Americas are the ones caught with their pants down as the saying goes. Interesting when we ourselves got it in our heads that anti-lockdown protests were somehow uniquely American when they were seen in Poland, the Netherlands, the UK and Germany; places that have either a UBI or temporary nationalization of wages essentially proving wrong progressives here who hypothesized if people had sufficient income to survive, their jobs merely placed on hold protests would be cut in half. If America’s so bad and every other western nation so good at managing a pandemic that we are the only ones so collectively ignorant, astoundingly stupid to argue over basic science and medicine regarding masks preventing the spread of disease, the importance of distancing yourself from strangers, those you don’t live with/ the prudence of avoiding large gatherings, parties then why is a French bus driver brain dead after a mask dispute, how is that different than the people shot here during confrontations over masks in anything except numbers, why were there protests in Germany saying masks made them slaves, comparing a mask to a muzzle, nearly a month later they are still going up against mask regulations there, why did they have to imposed a $59 fine on those ? Judging by how recent the last case is, is it possible they are copying American deplorable behavior since those represented included neo Nazis and anti vaxxers, earlier protests there and in other listed countries were classified far right politically, sure; however, every facet of media here portrays it as the world went from laughing at us, ‘mask rage’ videos fodder for things like the UK tabloids, to pitying us as our case and death numbers rise leaving the question why would they choose to imitate us and in the crowded numbers they did? The Netherlands a country who started out handling COVID 19 trying to achieve herd immunity, Sweden initially talked about for its termed lockdown light encouraging telework, social distancing virtually already built into their society, Sweden who kept elementary and middle schools open and operational while doing their version of distance learning for high school students; Sweden who despite their staggering death tolls compared to their Nordic neighbors didn’t find their hospitals overrun, the situation in their nursing homes mirroring the rest of Europe and the western world. Only now gaining pushback for their death tolls and no herd immunity, one woman’s story of her father in a nursing home though is not a failure of corona virus response rather it would appear their approach to euthanasia as they knew him to be COVID positive and instead of sending him to a hospital for treatment, providing onsite treatment they gave him morphine and let him die; her issue is not with COVID response but end of life protocols. Cops were led to an illegal birthday party in Australia via a KFC order and handed out something in the ball park of $18,000 in fines but we’re the only ones having so called ‘COVID parties.’ Australia also where they just instituted a 2 month lockdown on a neighborhood showing a growing number of cases, the 1 hour notice prompting anger and police citizen confrontation; Australia where the same area just tightened its mask mandate and the fines to individuals and businesses found no complying or in the latter’s case encouraging others not to comply. To be dispensed with hopefully once and for all discussing this round of the pandemic is how supposedly well other countries are now returning to a greater degree of normal than we are, never mind the assumption because they did the right things and we have yet to even start or try, when they got the virus first, hit their peaks in cases first so they are in a different stage of effect; Wuhan’s purported return to normal was in and out of lockdowns, lockdowns instituted in other areas of the country, when people were permitted to leave it was a rare scene of rioting level unrest as surrounding areas thought of those who were present in Wuhan during the initial outbreak as typhoid Mary, not all the mass exodus from the province explained by people who took a day trip for shopping, business, to visit relatives and were stuck for 76 days rather looking like people fleeing as if the devil himself were on their heels. The moment bars opened in the UK it was social distancing what social distancing, a local lockdown in another region if the UK after their version of a block party, thousands re-locked down in Spain after a spike in cases. Denmark and Austria were some of the first European nations to reopen still with so many restrictions it’s hardly worth it to call it that, getting back to normal in Italy means masks, gloves on public transit, one guesses they didn’t see the viral video by an American nurse on cross contamination, and documentation to be outside period with a specific sanctioned purpose. Too if your testing is so superior and Europe has it’s act that together why ban people from hotspots because realistically how many Brazilians and Russians do you get traveling there, how many Americans want to get on a plane to travel right now; nevertheless Americans and other hotspot inhabitants are banned from entering the EU. Not unnoticed, Sweden is part of the EU so they can’t be barred from coalition countries though the UK did put increased travel restrictions on those coming in from Spain in terms of mandatory quarantines after an uptick in cases from the latter country. Sweden who only now has health experts saying don’t do what we did and bemoaning the economic situation as they gained nothing from their lack of lockdown and are experiencing a contracting economy as people refuse to go to bars, restaurants, events, economy looking very similar to their Nordic and European neighbors; all news articles and commentary taken from that standpoint never asking if that was their primary objective or if it could have possibly been minimal disruption to daily life and society. In that they definitively succeeded, their current supposed ‘stricter measures than the rest of Europe’ so successful because lockdown was always voluntary, citizens making the collective choice to do or not do things because they don’t feel safe as opposed to the government imposing restrictions and taking away freedoms, independent the implied necessity, how temporary it’s supposed to be; if anything standing as an example of one of the ways you get a group of people, nation of citizens to do what you want. Another way to look at it they also lost nothing from an economic vantage point they look like their Nordic neighbors, European counterparts with the added success of less angry and resentful people more apt to listen to officials and authority despite the death toll, unless you were directly impacted losing loved one or friend; there protests for harsher lockdowns, more protections are far smaller than the number of satisfied citizens accepting of their government’s response if pleased is too strong a word. Equally averted the numbers of those experiencing PTSD post lockdown as high as 29% when SARS swept through Asia likely limited to those who lost loved ones and friends not terror from the lockdown procedures themselves, an illusion of control over the virus in terms of choosing their behaviors if no one else’s quelling fear of the virus as well. Poor framing, lacking perspective reminiscent of the reporter who went to South Korea to investigate how they were successful at containing the virus put in quarantine, temperature checked daily then dismissed to her hotel to continue the practice only to find the kit she had been given was in Korean with no way for her to read and follow the accompanying instructions while buying a DVD, Blu-Ray player in America you are likely to get operation instructions in minimum 2 languages, an Asian dialect hardly out of the question, but commenters called the journalist incompetent for being American, there and not understanding the language trying to parallel it to a Korean reporter surprised things were in English; never mind Americans do print important documents in a variety of other languages due to the number of immigrants we see, pushed back against every time conservative politicians call it a waste of money, them and various groups scream about immigrants learning English, forget English is, and has been for decades, the lingua franca of commerce and upward mobility globally, the whole point supposedly being how good everyone else is and how bad America is at controlling a global pandemic, not in this instance. The same South Korea who had to shut down night clubs after an unmasked person infected several, identical South Korea too seeing spike in cases, having to close things for the 3rd time after a warehouse worker infected several more; South Korea who could never get their young people to stop attending supplemental tutoring academies that remained open even when their k-12 equivalent shutdown for the shortest time among nations so said the infectious disease doctor interviewed providing commentary on pandemic responses across the world (see link after paragraph 5). South Korea who famously didn’t need a lockdown January to May but infamously needs one as of late August, minimally in their capitol city Seoul. Once heralded Vietnam who was suddenly running quarantine flights to return tourists to the native parts of the country, perhaps most disturbing their cases are all native citizens or long term residents not foreign travelers. Everyone in American media at least appearing to have forgotten what medical experts said about the fall and a second wave almost inevitable since the earliest vaccine is not on track to be ready until spring 2021 and then going to essential workers, the vulnerable not average citizens, a second wave these countries we’re all crowning about now may be devastatingly hit by wishing they had numbers as small as ours exactly because so few people were infected in the first wave. Which brings up the predictable reality that, when more probable than if, lockdowns are re-imposed protests there, defiance there will look much the same as it does here, anger at doctors, disease specialists will emerge, but Dr. Fauci and his kids need protection because America is insane; no, it’s just officials and doctors elsewhere haven’t tried the limits of people’s patients, yet is the end of that sentence. Considering the knock-on effects of the global pandemic, yes social media and streaming entertainment venues consciously slowed down their services, lessened video quality in America to accommodate the sudden volume of users accessing them all at once, situations they were never designed for, more surprising done likewise in the UK for the same reason; hopefully once and for all shattering the millennial decades mythology of so called American decline the boy in Italy who had to be driven to a vacant field compete with folding table and chair literal bleating goat routinely heard in the background to do his homework because it is the only place within a somewhat reasonable range of his home he can get an internet signal- but America. Resulting in the common phrase among youth because America… when we come up with the latest bizarre fast food concoction or inventors created a French fry holder for your cars in the same vein as the cup holder, phone or tablet dock so that people were more likely to keep their hands at 10 and 2 make fires more easily reached for while driving; why then is Finland playing catch up in the race for 5G with both China and the United States, why did they partner with an American Cellphone company T-Mobile to achieve part of their goals; couldn’t be that whole global economy thing could it? Italy whose southern region was more effected by the inability to work and move around freely caused by virus lockdown than by the ravages of the virus itself stoking tensions between the haves and the have not’s, pushing the far right populism rising in Europe but American inequality. Said populism that saw the Hungarian leader using the pandemic to take steps essentially setting himself up as dictator, yet America is the national bullet train to fascism; oh and for all our election foreign interference and attempts to sabotage mail in voting during a pandemic New Zealand’s Prime Minister just suspended their elections because of their rise in cases. The Associated Press noting the pandemic has exposed economic and racial disparities not in American healthcare but French healthcare; change the names of the studies and the advocacy agencies obviously of French origin and someone could easily mistake it for the ‘developed world outlier the United States; harkening frequent readers back to the surprisingly eye opening story of the UK’s Adam Payne and his mother’s fight for accessible housing to meet the family’s needs, mange his multiple disabilities, reality racism probably played a role in her fight being a Muslim woman of color, her son’s Anglo sounding name causing hospital personnel to never as if she was Adam’s mother, him nonverbal and unable to say so, who long ago stopped wearing her hijab made to feel increasingly uncomfortable doing so. One has to wonder the way the George Floyd protests went global not just viral, nations worldwide grappling with racism and the roots of colonialism’s effect on native and indigenous peoples if those Italian mayors were truly berating selfish citizens or black, persons of color looking for hair management that has been a part of their lives from an early age sought at one of the mobile sites because all salons had been shut down; black individuals like in this country making up some percentage of essential workers, those working from home who still require a professional appearance for work. Closely review the video announcing the Australian lockdown of that neighborhood and you’ll see a police officer holding someone on the ground; what about the French man on video from that country telling officers an all too familiar phrase to our ears I can’t breathe before again all too familiar dying, but police brutality only in America. To paraphrase the Eminem lyric will all the progressives please shut up.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/pence-s-handling-2015-hiv-outbreak-gets-new-scrutiny-n1144786

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/political-influence-skews-trump-s-coronavirus-response-n1191236

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/499265-former-white-house-aide-won-3-million-contract-to-supply-masks-amid

https://www.salon.com/2020/06/20/the-trump-administration-paid-millions-for-test-tubes-they-got-unusable-mini-soda-bottles-instead_partner/

https://www.newser.com/story/289136/ignored-warnings-infighting-led-to-virus-response-failures.html

https://bgr.com/2020/06/26/coronavirus-update-thousands-of-people-on-uk-beaches-no-social-distancing/

https://apnews.com/df7ee1fd0cc8d334fab0689889998d77

https://www.newser.com/story/289178/tooth-fairy-easter-bunny-declared-essential-workers.html

https://www.newser.com/story/292361/ardern-gets-the-military-involved-after-sisters-test-positive.html

https://apnews.com/8bd9ec1261d19913a301a9bfb8684321

https://apnews.com/da33e87b13b9634bfc5e0e1bedb7419c

https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/1915668/arrests-conspiracy-theories-at-australia-anti-lockdown-protest

https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-latest-spain-anti-lockdown-protest-draws-thousands-of-far-right-supporters/a-53542279

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/18/anti-lockdown-protests-germany-uk-and-poland.html

https://www.newser.com/story/293205/bus-driver-brain-dead-after-mask-related-attack.html

https://www.newser.com/story/294413/thousands-of-germans-protest-masks-that-make-us-slaves.html

https://apnews.com/a0c7669902d01c346e365e7cb15644e8

https://apnews.com/058bf7239d55bc50c18b2732334eba38

https://www.newser.com/story/293395/cops-mightve-missed-the-illicit-party-if-not-for-the-kfc-order.html

https://variety.com/2020/film/news/dalian-china-coronavirus-cinemas-closed-again-1234715423/

https://www.newser.com/story/293917/swedish-health-experts-dont-do-what-we-did.html

https://theweek.com/speedreads/924238/sweden-literally-gained-nothing-from-staying-open-during-covid19-including-no-economic-gains

https://apnews.com/485edd23980df1ff28bdb761dadb2e8a

https://apnews.com/bb529f8fe0f36e1d54d4933ff8d3816c

https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/youtube-netflix-degrade-video-quality-europe-bandwidth-1203540130/

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/21/5g-race-how-finland-is-trying-to-compete-with-china-and-the-us–.html

https://www.t-mobile.com/news/press/nokia-5g-agreement

https://apnews.com/c24688dd5a382aae4f9ef42f23abe627

https://apnews.com/0c3f1ae72ca05f66f4916d28f0962a87

https://www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/how-one-mother-took-on-the-system-for-her-disabled-son-and?bfsource=bbf_enus&utm_term=.iclkBNLDa#.eimg54v9w

https://www.barrons.com/news/i-m-suffocating-france-probes-delivery-man-s-death-after-arrest-01592851504

Gauging responses part of it has to be understood as the boy who cried wolf problem because SARS, MERs, swine flu, bird flu all had epidemic if not pandemic potential that never came to fruition here or in Europe, Ebola was supposed to possibly be a huge threat that never came to pass; infected Americans those who went to the region to render missionary medical aid those who treated the lone American patient traveling to the area to visit family or whatever his business. Identical scenario with MERs, again the infected Americans were healthcare workers who treated persons in Saudi Arabia, the middle east; H1N1 effected far less and killed fewer still, now having a vaccine. West Nile and Zika both effected the old and in the latter’s case pregnant mother’s newborn offspring; plus the mitigation for the 2 mosquito borne illnesses was spays done to public areas to kill the pests, wearing repellent, removing collection places for stagnant water, not lockdowns, quarantines, mask mandates and social distancing. The fact it came from China just amplified this because it was the information white noise of 1 it’s over there and 2 they have another one causing people right up to the most competent government officials to tune out. Equally there are the things President Trump, any president regardless of name, party affiliation republican, democrat, independent or a future party yet to be named, doesn’t have control of, has minimal control of or can’t do alone; no, he is not irresponsible for touting experimental possible treatment drugs showing both promise in research and testimonials of positive patients given them and having gotten better, to the point of not being on precious, in short supply ventilators. Later we would find that apparently he did want the drug flooded to hotspot areas available indiscriminately to doctors or the general public yet that never happened thanks to a now ousted disease specialist; plus there is the anecdotal evidence from people given hydroxychloroquine by a doctor post a positive COVID 19 test, routinely in a hospital setting, and almost immediately, within hours feeling better including at minimum one nurse, a man who was on a nasal cannula, nasal oxygen but never a coveted ventilator, people who swear by it for no other motivation than it made them better, the betterment of the patients seen that they might have a mirroring outcome. Added to the pharmacy student comment on an independent media video both calling out Trump and detailing the disastrous drug trial results that were stopped because people were dying and experiencing severe heart problems, calling the dosages used, doled out by China, an overdose and not merely an overdose but a substantial one; presenting the question is the true problem the drug or how much of it is being used? Nor is he responsible for the couple who then took a variation on not the medication, for all the inconsistency of messaging coming from the Whitehouse at exactly at the wrong time, he was clear these were medications you get at a pharmacy, probably (do) require a prescription from a doctor, but fish tank cleaner with a similar name “because he [the president] kept saying it was basically pretty much a cure;” husband dying, wife in the hospital. Adjacently whether Trump is/was at any time taking a regimen of hydroxychloroquine, Chloroquine or not, whether he said so as a distraction, stated it in a moment of his all too often on display blatant irresponsibility while relevant due to his title, his standing on the world stage as the leader of our nation and the idea, entity known as the free world it remains secondary to the much bigger question what doctor would prescribe it for him factoring in his age, his weight and the ineffectualness of the drug against COVID 19 let alone taken prophylactically as he intimated he was; more alarming if it was the Whitehouse doctor and do we have another Ronny Jackson situation on our hands. Recalling Jackson was the one who gave that glowing summation of his physical results and while being vetted for VA secretary was discovered to have been handing out sleep aides and other drugs like candy as well as creating a hostile working environment, drinking on the job with a double digit number of people coming forward to detail his misconduct. Doctors have long complained about dealing with patients that come into their offices experiencing something called the House effect based on the 8 season popular syndicated medical fiction TV show depicting solving rare or unusual medical cases, people suddenly believing they too might suffer from what they saw, identically doctors combat patients coming to their office asking for the prescription they saw in a commercial on TV, but that doesn’t mean you acquiesce, so exactly where is the irresponsible danger of the president’s rhetoric on the drug if doctors won’t be giving it and where are their medical ethics if they are randomly giving it? Contrasted to his suggestion of drinking/ injecting bleach, equivalents of rubbing alcohol, UV lights, items people can get in stores no questions asked, no prescription required, people already using cleaners in unsafe ways to sanitize their homes; though if you need to be told not to drink or inject either rubbing alcohol or bleach, regardless of if the president throws the idea out there, you have bigger problems. First question to be asked about the teen allowed to go to a church gathering despite being immunocompromised coming down with COVID symptoms instead of being taken to a hospital given hydroxychloroquine by her parents is where they obtained the drug, what doctor did she see who wrote that prescription, from what black market space did the parents get the drug; why are they not up on child endangerment charges for letting her attend, giving her the drug and waiting so late to get her to professional medical treatment if not all 3? Followed by how does the doctor who appeared in a right wing video with a bunch of other people in lab coats (unclear if they are doctors) saying you don’t need a mask and as late as the end of July still touting hydroxychloroquine, as a cure not simply a treatment, maintain her license also known for controversial theories that gynecological problems stem from sex with demons and vaccines are created with alien DNA; why are there not stories of the state responsible for her license investigating her so the president and conspiracy groups like Q anon don’t have quacks to tout, so it doesn’t become the vaccines cause autism doctor all over again regardless what the president does or doesn’t say. Neither is he, our president, racist merely by wanting to refer to the virus, officially titled COVID 19 as either the Chinese or Wuhan virus; because, he is factually correct it did originate from China in the city/province of Wuhan scientifically speculated to have come from bats and transferred to humans via a wet market popular in China selling exotic meat, animals kept in deplorable and disease conducive conditions. Added impetus to keep referring to it as such when they then subsequently attempted to cover it up robbing the world of critical time to prepare for what they knew was coming having battled SARs in 2003, swine flu in 2009 to a greater degree than America or the western world and MREs in2015 ravaging the Asian nations China among them, piling on to their errors or selfishness they denied global scientists the virus genetic sequence that would have allowed those scientists to begin the long process of producing a vaccine, the perhaps shorter duration of developing treatment drugs, protocols to help save lives and preserve quality of effected lives. President Trump’s goal, however instinctual it was, was to apply appropriate international pressure upon China ideally toward changing their behavior, culture to eliminate wet markets; but blaming China is his latest tactic of scapegoating from our own lackadaisical response under his leadership, hardly or would it be better said not exclusively when it was revealed they were hording crucial PPE quite possibly not just for the nation’s increased use but to then sell back to the globe at a higher price. Secondly on the, this time unfounded accusation of racism, we aren’t looking at another Charlottesville, accurately naming the virus’ origin was never meant to be a kind of open season on Chinese Americans, Asian Americans, Asian nationals, students, visa holders, permanent residents of Asian heritage, there were no figurative dog whistles or as he’s apt to use bull horns being sounded to any Asian in the U.S. just those officials, responsible parties in China. Nor are the waivers he ‘forced’ attendees of his recent rallies to sign in order to attend approaching as atrocious as they are being made out to be by the media and experts, his was rather the first of many such waivers to be seen in the future once concerts, political rallies, comic conventions, music festivals and such return post virus; in fact a short time later another article noted your collegiate institution may ask you to sign a waiver absolving them of any liability from harm caused by the virus, piece prudently advising students not to sign but present nonetheless, unlikely educational institutions are/were taking their cues from the president over standard legal advice dispensed by a layer or legal team for the school. Focusing on actions taken and not taken, sure president Trump could have issued a national stay at home, safer at home order and gotten the whole country on the same page with a clear concise message, but does anyone not think those same reluctant and recalcitrant governors who were the last to enact stay at home restrictions, some who never did, wouldn’t have pushed back against president Trump even in red states manned via officials who previously supported him as demonstrated by exactly what happened. Identical scenario with masks, you could have a national order mandating face coverings when in public, as Kyle Kulinski detailed federal guidelines on social distancing with the same practical results from the same stubborn local officials. Secondly in this section, who doesn’t understand that the republican, red state, right wing response would have been identical, potentially even more resistant if COVID 19 had happened under the Obama administration, or if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016 precisely because their names are president Obama and Hillary Clinton respectively, if this had happened in 2021, 2025 with Bernie Sanders as president, a predictable president Biden, with an unnamed republican president, a winning 3rd party candidate? Thirdly who would blame democratic, progressive governors, state officials for ignoring the words of the president after 3 years of listening to and plainly comprehending our current commander in chief lies, the president regularly displays his incompetence, his utter ignorance on important job related topics; the problem with the governors of states like Louisiana and surrounding areas who said they would have acted quicker on safer at home orders had they received more direction from the Whitehouse, why after 3 years of the above would you be looking for or trust more direction from the present occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Which brings us to the people, over and over progressives talk about those citizens who listen to Trump, take their cues for him, up to 30% of the country according to analysis who aren’t taking a deadly virus seriously, who aren’t wearing masks because he isn’t, aren’t social distancing because they see press briefings of people crowded on the podium, press packed into the briefing room but people with 5 functioning brain cells would, again citing the above, common sense compelling them to do the opposite. Speaking of the public, a population between 320 and 340 million persons, somewhat misleading are the research findings that had cities/states like New York initiated stay at home/lockdown orders as little as 10 days to2 weeks earlier 50 to 80% of deaths could have been prevented dido studies indicating social distancing could be 99% effective, setting aside the latter is so hard to do for a reason well beyond humans being so called social animals. People would not have been as willing to comply 10 days to 2 weeks earlier part of what got New York to be so adherent is the deaths plastered on the local and national news, California was a stone’s throw from Washington state and the outbreak found there yet it took a comparatively long time to reach the crisis level they are experiencing arguably when people after 2-3 months began to ignore lockdown measures. Next critically assessing the administration’s pandemic response to be dispensed with is this mythology of a stockpile of the kinds of medical equipment needed for the current health crisis, the practical fact you cannot stockpile the disposable N95 and/or surgical masks, face shields, shower cap type coverings used to contain nurses and doctors hair, the paper like gowns meant to shield doctor’s clothing from body fluids because if left sitting for years on end it will quickly degrade and become useless, how we ended up with dry rotted masks in the national stockpile sent out during the crisis. A doctor described his large hands and putting on the only available disposable gloves only for them to in turn split open; news flash Kyle Kulinski and his cohorts screaming about stockpiles and ill preparedness the same thing would happen with degraded ones no matter their being the correct size. The lone thing president Trump could have and should have done is meet with the manufacturers of said equipment increasing production then evoking the defense production act; further Dr. Rick Bright, the alluded to ousted disease specialist, testified before congress on both his firing and the sluggish pandemic response telling our legislators, among other things, that we would need an estimated 3 billion masks to meet the current crisis and give protective equipment to all those who needed it while the stockpile had a comparatively meager 300 million. Talk about a daunting task if not an impossible one there was/is no way to buy or make that many masks and with it the same amount of gloves and gowns exc. even with the defense production act in full swing sans leaving out some set of critical or essential workers for a period of time had we started when experts suggested; PPE shortage slated to last years according to experts no doubt in part due to while ventilators, drugs and other items will be in less demand on different parts of the globe as cases decrease in certain areas, as mitigation efforts produce positive outcomes in reducing infections, there is the amount of items now deemed PPE used by doctors in their daily work absent a pandemic, used by dentists and other medical professionals subtracting the pandemic. Non-medical essential workers, who work in grocery stores, deliver food, drive busses or forms of transportation, PPE needed for the schools Trump insists on reopening, the masks and gloves required on Italy’s public transit, city and statewide mask orders across the US heading into the warned about fall and will be used globally to one extent or another until there is mass proliferation of a vaccine. Yes maintaining ventilators should have been a priority but again stockpiling them is much more complicated than it appears on its face. Putting aside the maintenance expense, the time it would take professionals to do so on the amount of ventilators we suddenly found we needed, there is the technological reality that every few years ventilators are redesigned, modified based on new materials and internal components, improvements for patients with specific breathing ailments, ones that are smaller, more compact, easier to maneuver through a hospital, better energy efficacy, as it was doctors were talking about being able to use older ventilators yet it’s not ideal. And to be clear no American has died for want of a ventilator; the singular publicized case of a person removed from lifesaving machines for the purpose of giving it to someone else was an 80 something year old man on ECMO, an exceedingly more complex device of which there are far fewer in medical circulation because they are much less used, with the consent of the family knowing their father had had a good life and the recipient was a 24 year old with a lot of life ahead of them and their dad would want to do this. Anti-viral drugs were not something mentioned by experts as in limited supply enough to be a possible problem yet routinely brought up by Kyle Kulinski, however once again people who have ever taken antibiotics or owned a bottle of aspirin know they have an expiration date and using any kind of prescription or over the counter medication past its expiration date is dangerous because some become stronger, others become weaker with age; YouTube talk show host though he is, certainly smart enough to comprehend you need to know which one(s) you must mass produce for it to help people. Also to be put out there is the fact the national stockpile does have things in it for different types of disaster/national emergency in fact a reporter looking into this told her colleagues and viewers we would have been better prepared for an act of bio-terrorism with smallpox vaccines, anthrax antidotes, because we didn’t have an anthrax scare a few years ago at the post office, that had the Supreme Court closed as opposed to phoning it in mirroring what they are doing during the pandemic now; except that’s exactly what happened and exactly why those items were put there. Guaranteed too is if we attempt to stockpile things needed during the pandemic for future occasions, in addition to its rapid disintegration we will inevitably end up needing complexly different supplies touching off an identical mad scramble for those things. Quickly Mr. Kulinski and his fellow progressive were shouting doctors didn’t need PPE they needed hazmat suits, obvious question do we have spare hazmat suits from labs, usually used in chemical spills doctors can be given, does it make practical sense for doctors to be wearing such equipment if they become over heated and begin passing out, as it was COVID testing sites in hot areas across the country had to be shut down or hours reduced because it was drive-thru, outdoors and staff in layers of PPE were succumbing to the weather, in treating patients with high fever susceptible to the delirium and hallucinations that can accompany them can you effectively treat them and keep yourself safe if they are terrified of you one nurse chronicled a patient calling it a moon suit, to say nothing of the news footage showing hospital personnel in things suspiciously close to hazmat level gear if not directly designated such. Just like with testing agreed there isn’t enough, agreed a national strategy, implementation of the defense production act would have made things much easier then there’s the reality of what was said by one Dr. Michael Osterholm epidemiologist who told the anchors of Morning Joe April 13th the reality is you were never going to be able to test 30 million people a day due to the reagent chemicals needed to make the tests work even had the national stockpile been exactly what it was supposed to be and holding everything we needed; effective reagents akin to that classic the West Wing’s Leo McGarry explaining the attributes of scotch 12 year old good scotch, 29 year old very good scotch, Jonny Walker Blue being 60 year old scotch. Correlation, it takes X amount of time to make the reagent chemicals that will create an accurate result, a process that cannot be sped up, moreover for the best, most conclusive results you want the 60 year old scotch equivalent; Osterholm at the same time bluntly frank about what we were up against and what to expect i.e. 50% of the country infected 1 million dead paralleling it to a war and we were going to lose people. Facts stated independent anything president Trump had or hadn’t done rather explaining the nature of the beast, the detrimental effect of the disease even if we did everything right. Another expert in early May telling it like it is saying it has spread so fast globally, not singularly in America the only way to bring it under control now is via vaccine Realistically comparing and contrasting other country’s responses, indeed South Korea and the U.S. had their first reported cases on the same day consistently omitted from conversations about how each country handled the virus South Korea has 16 point something (low decimal point) percent, maximum 17 percent of the United States population, Iceland was capable of doing so well on testing because it is so sparsely populated, the first country to offer and achieve total nationwide testing was Luxembourg; why, it’s tiny. Italy had doctors wearing something looking an awful lot like hazmat gear and 40 plus doctors were still dead in a single hospital, much the same scenario in the hospital profiled for NBC News, to start with it was designated an infectious disease hospital therefore build with the space in mind to have designated separated hallways to avoid contamination, had the hazmat gear, complete with COVID patients too but in a different area where they weren’t overrun, patients were not stacked in hallways for a place to put them; watching you hear the narrator and see the nurse talking to a doctor inside an infectious patient’s room via window, handing off the desired medicine through a window, uh oh can you see where this is going? What if the nurse mishears the name of similar sounding medications through that essentially gas mask, gives the doctor the wrong dosage misheard through the garble of gear, doctor trusting the nursing staff injecting the patient without looking or without time to look lest they die and end up dying because they got the wrong thing; how much more likely is that to happen with American doctors wholly unused to the equipment, how garbled your voice is speaking through it- but they all need hazmat suites. Speaking of doctors, Greece is another country hailed for its successful virus response among other things using technology to make getting prescriptions and government help easier limiting the need to be out, delivering items such as medications and groceries to help it’s aged population avoid infection; standing out for this American observer watching the news piece, the statement they doubled their ICU’s and hired 4,000 doctors information light on how they did the first thing, presumably they hired the mentioned number of doctors from other parts of the EU where medical licensing and so forth is bloc wide, part of what made Brexit so devastatingly complicated, an option not available to other countries where medical credentialing is different by nation, state/province. Staffing headaches stateside during the pandemic perhaps only a forewarning considering the estimate global shortfall of nurses anticipated by 2030 and that was before the start of the pandemic killing some medical staff, those who will be so mentally and emotionally devastated by the toll the pandemic is taking on medical workers they will quit never to return. What we did do was graduate early 4th year medical students capable and desiring to go help strapped hospitals, put out calls for retired doctors and nurses both nationwide and locally to provide relief. We did begin to use hotels and college dormitories to house healthcare workers afraid to take disease home to their families, individual hospitals took on the task of washing nurse and doctor scrubs so they don’t have to take it home and do so, it just wasn’t done fast enough for Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough. Someone else got the idea to use RV’s to house healthcare personnel too afraid to go home and people drove cross country to donate their RV’s to needy nurses/doctor, a grass roots organized achievement not bet handled by the government. Up for intense debate is if the solution to approaching pandemic preparedness and response is an excess number of ICU beds in case of that type of emergency or what ended up happening was lesser used areas of hospitals in hotspots converted to ICU spaces or non-pandemic/epidemic patients, utilizing large atriums for non-contagious persons; or is it what was floated in one article turning a person’s own bedroom into a hospital room with either is the answer to ventilators having more of them available for what we are seeing or again what happened, which was doctors from lesser, not yet effected hospitals saying they had ventilators not being used overwhelmed areas could have and they created a system to borrow them and return them when no longer needed, sending them to areas as needed since it was known fairly quickly this would hit the country in a wave pattern versus everywhere at once. Would it have been better if this operation was directed from a national perspective, from the federal government on down, yes, should it be that way going forward into the future, for forthcoming outbreaks, emergencies, yes; but then there’s the practicality that even if the federal government had taken on said role it would have had to be carried out at the local level. Just like the tiny hospitals in one Texas county turning people away saying the COVID positive would be better off at home who don’t have beds, have something in the neighborhood of 8 ventilators; several things are going on here at once independent a lack of Medicaid expansion and closure of rural hospitals under our for profit healthcare system, A- healthcare officials have asked the local government for a field hospital, series of them and been repeatedly denied for inexplicable reasons. B- they have stumbled onto a hard truth for journalist, people in general to grasp in our also preserve life, quantity of life sans quality of life, I’m terrified I’ll get sued medical system where doctors don’t know how to talk to their older patients about dying, end of life, tests and lifesaving measures are thrown at the patient during their last days whether they wanted it or not because their family can’t accept it or they never put it in legally binding paperwork; they probably are better off at home with their loved ones than just to end up dying alone in a sterile hospital, family likely already exposed somewhat negating the narrative you’re sending them home to further infect their entire family. What small hospitals reveal about our medical system in sparsely populated corners of the U.S. mimics the finer details behind the clean water problem the greatest nation on the globe faces people who stay in areas where the hospital is slated to close has already closed, less citing unable to move rather unwilling, people with known medical conditions who knew the helicopter was the only way out, knew the time it would take, knew about their diabetes and stayed the mother who was initially fine with living in an area consisting of a store and a stoplight then her daughter was diagnosed with a significant medical condition and yet she stayed, a mother willing to drive across state lines to ensure her daughter can see a pediatrician while living in the embodiment of Mayberry thankful for the telehealth option when she had a stroke in the slightly bigger office. Places that have 1 ventilator and 8 ICU beds because they are rarely used patients in accidents, natural disasters routinely life flight-ed to the nearest larger, designated trauma center hospital because that too is rarely needed. Regarding pandemic preparedness specifically knowing what we know about the type of supplies needed why would you spend limited resources, which under the best of circumstances in the best of places would still yes be limited on the things needed 1% of the time ( a once in 100 years pandemic) at the expense of things needed 99% of the time Even under the national healthcare model public funding of public institutions hospitals, doctors, medical professionals like the UK’s NHS or public funding of private institutions like in France doctors, hospitals, medical professionals it is not a good use of taxpayer dollars to have a state of the art hospital paying all the doctors and nurses commiserate with their specialties, simultaneously stagnating their skills and squandering their potential, when something else is needed, think the rural hospitals surviving, keeping their doors open focusing on family medicine. The latest in the saga of clean water in America that unquestionably should be a human right, at most the final traces of lead due to piping and other contamination should be being eradicated from water sources, making situations like Flint all the more tragic, since blog and author talked about natural disasters and the things we never learn also showing us things about the pandemic; again it’s Indian reservations, a former coal town steadily dwindling in population and the lingering question which makes better sense both fiscally and practically thereby answering the morality of clean water being a human right forcing utility companies to spend millions of dollars to run water lines to 2-300 people here, maximum 400 there, millions more in upkeep if not maintained repeating the problem all over again, or to move all the people to one area and add a single set of waterlines? Solutions devised by nonprofit and advocacy agencies, that do exist and are working on the problem, arguably better in terms of more sustainable and environmentally friendly because the government didn’t step in and force utility companies to provide it rather tailored them to the specific area exactly with longevity in mind. People uncaring of who fixes it and necessarily how as long as it is fixed and stays fixed.

https://www.cnn.com/2014/05/12/health/mers-outbreak-u-s-/index.html

https://www.mysuncoast.com/2020/04/01/covid-patients-remarkable-recovery-prompts-florida-officials-consider-hhydroxychloroquine-treatment/

https://www.salon.com/2020/06/08/people-are-gargling-bleach-drinking-household-cleaners-to-avoid-coronavirus/

https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/news/story/florida-teen-died-covid-19-attended-large-church-71647393

https://variety.com/2020/politics/news/trump-rally-coronavirus-waiver-sue-1234632402/

https://www.thederrick.com/news/health/commentary-your-college-may-ask-you-to-sign-a-waiver-for-harm-inflicted-by-covid/article_e36c39c5-67c1-5ed8-a6a6-54022aab0ba5.html

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-07-23/california-wanted-to-be-no-1-but-not-in-covid-19-how-the-virus-just-keeps-spreading

https://www.businessinsider.com/usa-1-percent-3-billion-face-masks-needed-coronavirus-pandemic-2020-3

https://www.salon.com/2020/08/18/ppe-shortage-could-last-years-experts-warn_partner/

https://www.wired.com/2001/10/anthrax-scare-hits-supreme-court/

https://apnews.com/4d8a9e01ffd872f6fabb5269d2ecea90

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-04-20/hospitals-beds-home-care-coronavirus

Medically there are a thousand and one things happening at once so one might be forgiven for being unable to keep up with it even when you work in media like the independent variety, doing the kind of work blog and author do, never mind average citizens scrambling to pay bills, obtain food, balance childcare and working from home if possible, remote learning minus devices or internet access, juggling child/children while filing for unemployment, food stamps, temporary assistance when those things require in person waiting in long lines, sitting in your car or standing outraise offices because online versions have crashed, your access to the internet was your local library suddenly closed and every trip feels like a gauntlet of safety hazards. But when doctors originally didn’t know how much PPE they needed in the beginning, were learning as they went, including colleagues sickened by the virus, how were governments, America or elsewhere, supposed to produce anything close to accurate estimates? Often demonized by the political left Rachel Maddow did a segment on COVID 19 and the southern hospital, who hearing early rumors about the virus and supplies needed, tried to amass their own stockpile for their facility, what they thought would last for 30 days, interestingly enough the same amount now mandated in Taiwan hospitals post SARS, they burned through it in 7 days; begging the question how did Taiwan calculate their numbers and were they accurate for future outbreaks mentioned elsewhere in the piece before COVID, let alone during/after? When hospitals fully understand the word epidemic/pandemic in a way the public never truly can and they didn’t immediately implement best practices i.e. checking the temperature of every person coming into the hospital staff and limited visitors, how a dad managed to conceal his fever and be with his wife in the maternity ward at the birth of their child promptly giving her COVID 19; but the president and the federal response is the largest problem- sure. On the topic of ventilators it isn’t just the number we don’t have it’s the fact that people are spending 20 and 30 days on them when sick with COVID where previously it was 5, 7, maximum 10 days indicating there would have been a shortage independent a superb federal government response, a fully functional national stockpile. As detail our first case of COVID 19 was found officially on January 20 further investigation as adjusted that backwards to sometime in December and full accounting will be years in the making yet it was April before a doctor explained to CNN that the splitting of ventilators, putting 2 or more people on the same machine was something that could only be done for hours not the days or weeks required to manage COVID patients; why it worked so well in treating Las Vegas massacre victims but is wholly untenable for COVID. Surely to be forgiven are the average people, the singer P!nk who when talking to an entertainment magazine about her son’s battle with COVID stated ‘they (meaning medical professionals, news anchors paraphrasing medical doctors) said our kids would be ok;’ unconscionable the mother who’s a doctor, who should be able to parse the words stated by medical professionals far better than the rest of us, understand the meaning behind the news person paraphrase better than us, do her own research more efficiently if it came to that, and whose 4 year old got corona virus speaking out to media on the fact that yes kids can get it, to beware and aware. When what experts said early on was that if kids got it, because none had officially done so at that point, well before the appearance of the Kawasaki like disease post COVID reaction that can be deadly if not recognized and appropriately treated, they would be less likely to die from it and for them it would be far less impactful than the seasonal flu, increasingly deadly among children in the last 5 years. Worrisome are the reflexive public and medical professionals of all stripes reaction to standard of care protocols, too often called rationing care, even commentary to media from some doctors, first of all it’s called triage and has been around since the implementation of modern medicine not always applying solely to accidents, natural disasters but to large influxes of patients over all, progressives prone to calling them the actual death panels conservatives fear mongered about refusing to pass Obamacare, other doctors merely advised people if they know what they want for instance not to be put on a ventilator to please tell their family, make their wishes known so that they don’t expend needed equipment on those who don’t want it. Equally disturbing is the numbers of doctors, nurses and hospital staff who are proclaiming they didn’t sign up for this, and no blog is not referring to the lack of protective equipment, the elevated chance of dying due to lack of safety precautions/protections, heckling by lockdown protesters who don’t see what they do every day and from their perspective don’t get it, instead nurses not merely sad and frustratingly helpless in the face of a new disease but exclaiming they didn’t sign up to be surrounded by so much death; but you did sign up to be a doctor or nurse, to go into some specialty in the medical field some more than others dealing with death on a daily basis think x-ray and ultrasound technicians versus an ER doctor. Contrast their comments to stories of doctors who brushed up and their emergency medicine training, their respiratory training to go help in their hospital’s ER, to better prepared to be an extra pair of hands outside their specialty to combat what was coming, to say nothing of those coming out of, delaying retirement because they knew they were needed. Top among the questions to be answered when comparing America to the rest of western world countries in areas like medical response, death rate, if we must do such a thing, is not why are so many people infected, why are they sick as in showing varying levels of symptoms, even to the point of hospitalization, being placed on a ventilator or maximum lifesaving techniques/machinery but why are they dying? Why are more men dying than women on a global scale even when factoring in lifestyle habits like smoking more common in males, less common in females; why are some type 2 diabetics, think Tom Hanks, surviving COVID while completely healthy and decades younger 20 and 30 something adults succumbing to it? Possible answer, accounting also for the wildly varying and symptoms mild to severe, people with cognitive difficulties who were never on ventilators, those who had strokes again sands ventilators, beyond the finding that COVID 19 is a blood vessel disease doctors then making some since of the symptomology based on which blood vessels were attacked in a patient’s body, is the not 1 but 3 strains of what has been named COVID 19 identified early on by a UK doctor; later we would hear about 2 distinct strains the one from China that ravaged Washington state staring in nursing homes, and the one from Europe devastating New York. So is the Kawasaki like disease hitting children the 3rd strain identified by the Cambridge doctor or a 4th strain yet to be understood as such, Vietnam’s latest surge in cases has them fearing a different, new more contagious strain, another common theme subsequent mutations found are usually more easily transmitted than previous variants, a man in Nevada having the infamous distinction of the first case of U.S. confirmed reinfection was infected with a different strain than the one initially making him sick. Blood type is also a significant factor in the severity of symptoms for people mirroring SARS in Asia; closely intertwined is not just what the virus does to the body but your own immune system’s response that can be a problem; recall the thousands of lives one doctor believes we could have saved with a widely available common steroid to treat the body’s inflammation during COVID or the catastrophic over active immune response that can be treated with immunosuppressants ‘if only we had known sooner.’ Likewise it appears as if we need to have a serious conversation about what constitutes healthy at least as it pertains to this virus; a young woman who was shocked at how sick she became with COVID 19, at the edge of organ failure and death had she not received critical drug treatments but she had asthma and it’s a virus that was, at that time, known to primarily attack the lungs, why are you shocked? The woman in the UK video after the introduction speaking about the lack of PPE there also begging people to take lockdown measures seriously, follow social distancing and stay at home rules was a former smoker better explaining why she was so drastically effected; the man whose wife was on television pleading for convalescent plasma from those recovered possessing antibodies that could help her husband survive is married to a 40 year old obese person but is lost for words at how ill he is. Speaking to another progressive issue seen as a panacea, one of the fundamental reasons we don’t have Medicare for all has precisely nothing to do with political will to see it enacted, to catch up with every other westernized nation, more divorced than progressives assume from the influence and lobbying of big pharma, giant for profit healthcare institutions functioning like rapacious mafia middle men to quote Kyle Kulinski, instead cultivated by doctors in the mid 1990’s to early 2000’s when they started sounding the alarm about increases in obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer rates beginning to coin the phrase lifestyle related illnesses. With the goal of getting people to take greater agency over their health, eat better, exercise, warnings about sedentary lifestyles, smoking eventually saying you can prevent these coupled with the rising cost of healthcare in the HMO, pre Obamacare days led to the framing of why should I have to pay more in insurance premiums for people who won’t put down the cheeseburgers, go for a walk, loose the daily beers, cut the soda at an identical time when employers were starting to offer access to gyms, yoga, cessation of smoking support, stress management classes only evolving over time to refusing to hire smokers and other underhanded tactics barring people from making a living. Today you can easily hear people saying why should they pay more in taxes so people who put themselves in terrible shape, saddle themselves with diseases that cost thousands upon thousands of dollars to treat can receive free at the point of service healthcare; COVID being completely different attacking anyone exposed to wildly varying degrees when a young, healthy person can die while a person with something like hypertension can be on a ventilator, extremely sick and live. When lung problems can be the result of asthma, COPD the result of working environments long before there were the current laws effecting older people, immigrants from other countries with different laws, not just smoking; still the mindset persists, everything from Bill Maher talking about doctors who have to stop bring afraid to tell the American people the truth that one of the things they can do in addition to the wearing of masks, social distancing, hand washing is to get themselves in better shape, avoid putting on what is now being called the CIVID 15 citing our own studies indicating obese persons are twice as likely to have a negative outcome and an English study that found people with higher BMI’s (body mass indexes) had a 40% higher risk of dying from COVID. Never mind that the biggest flaw in BMI is that it only calculates the ratio between height and weight not if that weight is muscle or fat, primary reason doctors a-la Fauci and Birx didn’t wade into the controversial issue is likely because the mitigation procedures put forth are immediate versus if people nationwide started from the moment they heard either the disease specialist or Maher’s take on it, it would take weeks to months for them to see any results of their efforts and sands the immediate mitigation tactics a time in which they could be easily exposed to COVID in greater quantizes of virus, a factor that matters with this illness, exactly how much gets in your system, and die anyway. Never mind the obese people who get sick but never needed to enter the hospital with COVID 19 recovering, the ones who yes required care even in a hospital ICU but were never on more than supportive oxygen, the obese persons who were on ventilators but recovered eventually enough to be discharged and sent home alongside the healthy, ‘normal’ weight people who didn’t, the normal healthy weight people with no underlying conditions who had more complications post recovery than ‘the fat guy’; but according to Maher it doesn’t have anything to do with which strain you get, how much you were exposed to/how much got into your system, what your blood type is and are you one of the susceptible ones, did your immune system respond to the virus fighting it or over react basically eating your own body, just are you or aren’t you obese. It’s a similar thing with the vaccine and fears from experts the world’s growing obesity problem may hamper it’s effectiveness when it is ready, 1 what are you basing that on at best in the middle of phase 3 trials, 2 why doesn’t it appear to work on fat, ‘extremely fat’ people, 3rd why can’t it be a weight based medication mimicking the tetanus shot since the amount of viral load matters in terms of how sick patients get; 4th removing the laymen’s view of someone with no medical training, how can you say you have a promising vaccine if it this early on it appears not to be effective on a large percentage of our planet’s population. And why is the call to seemingly forewarn obese people, medical professional as opposed to the mindset if it doesn’t work for fat people time to go back to the drawing board until it does because this is medicine not a designer outfit. Scarily unsurprising is how many people agree with Maher likewise agreeing with the terrible sentiment that if you refuse to wear a mask, refuse to social distance, go to a party, insist on clinging to the idea that corona virus is a hoax then hospitals should reserve the right not to treat you; such comments all over video platforms, social media and comment forums, flying directly in the face of the Kyle Kulinski maxim sick help, meaning if you are sick you receive help according to need no questions asked about citizenship or financial status. Further for the often progressive quoted 46,000 people who die yearly in the U.S. because they don’t have healthcare, those presenting to the ER with COVID and in medical crisis who had comorbidities, AKA preexisting conditions by and large knew it, why it was alarming to see high blood sugars in COVID patients who had no history of diabetes. Neither will Medicare for all eliminate, even greatly reduce medical malpractice when the reason more women are dying in childbirth is because of doctors and hospitals not using best practices, eyeballing blood loss not measuring it, not listening to patients reporting bleeding, pain or other symptoms of serious complications because they are women and there is still a sigma of histrionics, old myths that black people can take/tolerate more pain. Kulinski relentlessly tells the story of his dad with poor or no health insurance who went to a chiropractor for back pain, kept going to the chiropractor despite continued pain and by the time he saw an actual MD he was diagnosed stage 4 lung cancer of which he not long after died, saying had he had medical insurance he would have gone to a real doctor not ones he equates with homeopathy and other unproven methods; except had the chiropractor done the standard x-rays used by chiropractors to look at the skeletal structure to see what is out of alignment, determine what adjustments are needed, if they can even help the person or if they need more extensive services from a back surgeon. Almost unbelievable they wouldn’t have seen something alerting them of the need for a medical doctor; setting that aside how long Kulinski senior’s pain persisted should have prompted his chiropractor to send him to a primary care doctor or some form of physician to rule out other causes of his pain including the cancer he was ultimately diagnosed with. I have personal family experience in that my mother and uncle both at various times in their lives used both medical doctors proscribing muscle relaxers and chiropractors to deal with their back and neck issues from physically demanding jobs and a hand full of car accidents between them; every chiropractor they went to did x-rays on the problem area before treatment and periodically during to assess progress, at the end to gage the final result or set up maintenance program to keep them aligned and physically functional, how my uncle learned the numbness in his leg was a misalignment bothering his sciatic nerve aggravated by the bobcat forklift like machine he drove daily at work, receiving the adjustments and relief and eventually quitting that job. Connecting this back to what is happening with COVID countering both Maher and Kulinski standing out to the untrained observer of the Anderson Cooper story about the diabetic asthmatic mother on a ventilator with COVID for at least a month now facing possible amputation of minimum her fingers that turned black due to lack of blood flow, maybe her hands as a consequence of COVID and poor health isn’t that her preexisting condition led her to her current tragic predicament, the caution Maher was trying to impart, nor the health insurance conundrum found only in America (though it needs to be said if she takes steroids for her asthma they are known to pack on the pounds, pregnancy known to alter hormones in a woman’s body leading to weight gain and she’d had at least 2 children; things Bill Maher being a man and no public history with asthma doesn’t know and caring doesn’t fit the sarcastic comedy of ‘tough love’ about America’s weight) no it smacks plainly of medical negligence that doctors weren’t paying attention to a known diabetic’s extremities fully cognizant that it could lead to amputation and often does as the disease progresses totally separate from COVID or her asthma and the recurring complications seen from the virus. Lingering question is if this was malpractice born of a COVID surge and doctors running from one set of blaring alarms signaling a patient in distress to another barely able to keep treatments straight for each one, find a stretch of hallway to park their bed in to be taken care of or was it more sinister neglect, dismissive inattention, perhaps some of that bias exhibited by Maher however unconscious by staff treating her. Separate technical question, are we saying there were no warning signs to that lack of blood flow before her fingers turned black and essentially died, once those warnings were present there was nothing to be done to try and save her hands/fingers; then medicine has a serious hole in it innovation needs to try and fill and fill quickly, at least with Broadway actor Nick Cordero they tried clot breakers before amputating his leg in an effort to save his life. Scrutinizing critically national healthcare systems, UK dentists concerned about patients missing vital appointments and elongated wait times to see an NHS dentist and the potential for undiscovered and thus untreated mouth cancer, however it’s America’s healthcare system that needs to be brought up to the standard, quality and function of the rest of the developed world, maybe not. Dentists here are seeing a problem with prolonged continuous mask usage that could exacerbate dental decay leading to things as seemingly unrelated as colon cancer which will potentially kill you too just slower when mouth bacteria travels to your gut. Yes we need to have a serious conversation about what constitutes healthy in the context of this particular virus, perhaps in more general terms but not the Bill Maher way, not the fat shaming way, which holds consequences beyond COVID 19 and beyond our borders, the case of a Canadian woman who had gotten the lectures Maher begs American doctors to give people for years is a cautionary tale of why this approach can be just as deadly. The 64 year old woman spent years feeling unwell and doctors spent most of those years advising weightless and little else no tests, no screenings until when she was finally diagnosed with cancer she had days to live, her obituary speaking for her and resonating with so many around the globe including the comments of a 43 year old ‘obese’ woman who was told for a decade to lose weight before being diagnosed with a degenerative genetic disorder; Newser article going on to note that fat people in Canada receive 3rd rate testing and treatment and avoid medical care for fear of being fat shamed, one has to wonder how much that too plays in as a factor here just as much as having no or incomplete health insurance. Kyle Kulinski when talking about other countries nationalized healthcare does note that people are waitlisted for elective procedures only yet even among priority patients going back to the malpractice angle if it is merely a matter of booking an operating room, scheduling a room for the procedure you need, what happens under nationalized care if they put you at the bottom of a list say 1-5 5 being the least and you should have been at level 2; recall the story of the man in the standards of care segment whose heart surgery was put on hold due to the pandemic ultimately spelling his death, meaning it wasn’t elective and it shouldn’t have been pushed off. Remember the heartbreaking store of the woman who died on her way to urgent care after spending hours in an ER waiting for treatment not because she didn’t have insurance but because she looked too young to be having the heart condition eventually found, looked otherwise healthy so they thought she could wait Returning to COVID contraction and outcomes, Chris Cuomo CNN personality who has done broadcasts from his home in quarantine after contracting corona virus giving ordinary people a bird’s eye view of his sickness and recovery underscoring doctor warnings it is no joke, it isn’t like the flu, the common cold, making him think he was going to die has an IGM deficiency making him susceptible to bronchitis and other respiratory illnesses; meaning it would have been a small wonder if he didn’t get the virus. Further if he makes the millions purported by independent media what was he doing working with his known condition and no necessity to do so; similarly, the tragic story of the nurse who died in his husbands arms waiting for an ambulance blamed on a lack of PPE, actually had to do with the fact he was a 2 time cancer survivor with a compromised immune system who chose to continue working despite his health status to which our response should be yes call him a hero unquestionably yet don’t blame the wrong thing for his death. Bringing up another valid question how did a 32 year old, yes one more cancer survivor, go from being weaned off his ventilator, ready to take it out the next day to dead within a few short hours leaving behind a wife and 2 small children; what did doctors miss so they don’t miss it again. Reality some people died because of what doctors didn’t know as much as for our terrible government response; lack of ventilators soon became less of a problem than when to use them and the effects of using them, vast increases the ventilator related syndrome, data telling doctors COVID was not like the previously known respiratory distress syndrome pushed onto a ventilator anyway and though patients oxygen levels were low they were breathing on their own initially, to every devastating after effect documented in modern history. New York governor Andrew Cuomo wildly criticized for placing positive COVID patients back in their long term care, assisted living facility or nursing home but he had a valid argument when it came to hospital born infections often contracted by older persons, sepsis, taking up hospital beds for people who need more acute care; lo and behold a study out of south Korea finds patients are no longer contagious after 11 days. If they were there for that long, and likely were, they weren’t spreading the virus supporting his supposition staff originally brought the virus in from outside facilities following the opposite effect when select facilities here and abroad cloistered staff and patients in the facility together no one on or out. And no a woman did not get a bill for 34,000 to treat her COVID 19 infection she got $34,000 bill because she was an actively treated cancer patient, doctors initially thinking her symptoms were either caused by her cancer or side effects of her treatment, when they had ruled out all of those possibilities they administered a COVID 19 test, results positive, subsequently treated her accordingly. Continuing, an open question is how much she will pay, not only now that it has gone public therefore will the hospital and the insurance company, lab testing facilities involved be willing to negotiate, which is a thing, will that hefty price tag prompt the patient to contact the mentioned facilities and ask questions regularly yielding errors and reductions in what’s owed; does she not have insurance leading to those eye-popping, astronomical numbers or is this what was left over once insurance paid their portion? Bringing us to Medicare for call, assuming that the $34,000 is the total bill, no insurance, it’s correct housing no errors, understand that Medicare covers 80% of doctor and hospital care, has prescription drug coverage, proposals to expand it by progressives would give everyone dental, vision, hearing aide coverage starting with seniors spanning a 4 year period to include at minimum all U.S. citizens if not undocumented residents. Well 20% of $34,000 is and $6,800, again stemming from the vast tests needed to diagnose her medical issue not for profit mafia middle men to quote one of Kyle Kulinski’s favorite phrases, and whether it’s 6, 60, 600 or 6,000 it doesn’t matter if you don’t have it, can’t get it, mirrored in disadvantaged students wanting to apply to colleges and struggling to afford/find application fees, accepted to college who can’t afford the 100’s of dollars in deposit to hold their spot. But Medicare for all, additionally when you spend 50 days in the hospital recovering from something as severe as COVID 19 in certain people you are going to rack up quite a bill, hints the $1.1 million bill presented to one man who was older, fortunately had Medicare so he won’t be paying much of that; Kulinski is a bit young meaning it’s unlikely he remembers the crack cocaine addicted babies of the 90’s called million dollar babies because that’s the price tag for the care it took to get them out of the hospital- certainly not following politics and social issues when his age was in the single digits, but has, according to his videos, followed the opioid crisis of recent decades and what it takes to get them healthy enough to leave the hospital after birth, cost far less price gouging and more intensity of care. Paralleled to COVID 19, how we handle those bills in light of the factual reality of a pandemic is a related but separate issue; complicating things is the aftercare many of the sickest require and not just limited to our aging population, applying to almost anyone, point being Medicare only pays for 21 days in a nursing home, long term care facility or rehabilitation center post that timeframe you are charged $170.50 per day “for covered services” never mind anything else; meaning even under the best case scenario people are still left with medical bills, so much for being like the rest of the developed world where ‘medical bankruptcy is not a thing. Rounding out this topic section, implementing Medicare for all in the midst of a pandemic maybe is not the best idea and here’s why, yes Medicare is familiar to most however they do not understand the intricacies associated with the program especially the enhanced version; contrastingly both doctors, hospitals, care facilities and insurance companies know the parameters of Obamacare, if the needed services are not covered there are local government and hospital programs to help. Insurance companies and pieces and parts of Obamacare have the staff to process the glut of claims caused by the pandemic Medicare does not. True there are many out of work who could be trained for pandemic created jobs in either contact tracing or Medicare for all claim processing, yet that entails a tremendous amount of training and is ripe for errors leading to unexpected large bills and hours of phone calls to rectify the situation. In other words implementing Medicare for all in the midst of a pandemic would be like that scene in Die Hard with a Vengeance where the brother of the bad guy from movie 1 seeks revenge on troubled cop John McClain under the cover of a heist of For Knox’s gold partially achieved by setting bombs throughout New York city; of course law enforcement tries to keep the public from finding out and creating panic which eventually happens anyway leading to the linked clip of the 9-1-1 operator yelling her boss’ name and exclaiming “ half the goddamn city just called 9-1-1!,” utter chaos at a time when our country can least afford it. Better would be to perhaps one last time use the giant for profit health insurance companies to write off the expense, you have a positive COVID test, the doctor strongly suspected CIVID but it was early in the pandemic and tests weren’t available, a surge and tests ran low, the current long term treatment you need stems from COVID complications, wipe the slate clean, no bills for those patients, companies profiting in the billions able to absorb the losses. An interesting investigation would be how countries with nationalized, single payer healthcare systems are dealing with the massive influx of insurance processing from intensively sick people overwhelming hospitals, information we’re not getting and why would they publicize it internationally; longer term question like their social safety nets expanded economically during the pandemic will the public funding taxpayer coverage of medical bills plunge the EU, individual Nordic nations, European countries into recession, depression, crippling debt?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAaDC0lv13s

https://www.newser.com/story/288930/dad-hid-virus-symptoms-to-enter-maternity-ward.html

https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2020/04/06/splitting-ventilators-inside-the-er-marquez-vpx.cnn

https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop/9351520/pink-coronavirus-symptoms-3-year-old-son-sick

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LNlFE1dvL4wipe

https://www.salon.com/2020/08/30/why-you-need-to-talk-to-your-parents-about-how-they-want-to-die/

https://www.salon.com/2020/06/01/coronavirus-is-a-blood-vessel-disease-study-says-and-its-mysteries-finally-make-sense/

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/05/the-coronavirus-mutated-and-appears-to-be-more-contagious-now-new-study-finds.html

https://bgr.com/2020/08/09/coronavirus-vaccine-effectiveness-obesity-prediction/
https://bgr.com/2020/04/23/coronavirus-treatment-high-blood-sugar-and-hydroxychloroquine/

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-dentists-warn-of-looming-dental-and-mouth-cancer-crisis-after-months-of-lockdown-measures-12030982

http://www.newser.com/story/262683/womans-obit-slams-fat-shaming-by-doctors.html

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-24/covid-19-patients-not-infectious-after-11-days-singapore-study

https://www.newser.com/story/289331/some-doctors-are-questioning-the-use-of-ventilators.html

https://www.salon.com/2020/07/12/medicines-misguided-romance-with-machines-is-making-the-coronavirus-worse_partner/

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/embed-test/3883da7c-c8d2-4d2f-abbc-acd27349e75e

Economically if it was so all important we ‘press pause on the economy’ as progressives al-a Kyle Kulinski call it shutting down the stock market for roughly a month, nationalizing key industries, think airlines versus handing them a bailout, rolling out either a UBI based on the median national income as they did in Canada or covered a percentage of people’s wages 80% in the UK, 75% in Denmark where was the G7, G20 level phone call between westernized, European nations looping in America to coordinate such a shutdown simultaneously, outlining when your stock market looks like this or reaches this point initiate shutdown and do so this way? While everyone remarked on America’s absence in a video conference between world leaders about procuring and coordinating funds toward a vaccine, one could argue both are of comparative importance, the former even more so; but for all the things Trump appears to have ignored because it didn’t suit the reality he was creating, the should have been G7, G20 type call wasn’t one of them, it just never happened. Here is where the ‘America can’t be the world’s policeman,’ ‘we are losing our superpower status over our COVID response’ assertion falls apart, because when America isn’t leading, isn’t handing out ideas no one else is, surprising is with the coalition that is the EU (European Union) the individual and disjointed nature of each county’s strategy to combat the pandemic. Yes Canada is providing $2,000 a month to every citizen for the duration of the crisis, should the follow up statement be ok call me when your financial situation starts to look like Greece a couple of decades ago, yes the UK is providing the listed percentage of income for what began as a 3 month lockdown, possibility of 6, however they are doing it for the first time so if you don’t think there will be glitches and people left our you are dreaming, Australia closed their nonessential businesses for 6 months in late March, governor Cuomo in New York projecting a 9 month lockdown in the state and what does your state/country look like when it’s over and things can go back to a semi-normal? Plus it’s ludicrous to think there aren’t people in any of these countries providing a select percentage of wage income who need 100% of their income to survive, who are like the couple in Italy caught by police stealing food pleading with them they didn’t have anything to feed their child, coupled with the people mobbing grocery stores for food. Look at exactly how long it took Spain to mobilize their plan for a UBI, if European nations and their penchant toward social welfare programs as a matter of course is the all hailed answer it’s made out to be by progressives here then why was is this the headline out of France: France Faces Worst Financial Crisis Since World War II or because it came not only from American news but ‘mainstream media’ are we going to just dismiss it? Another valid question to be asked, and will need to be answered, is what about seasonal businesses and their employees, will they be covered for the tail end of winter entities closed in January and February until the next winter season when they typically reopen; in countries such as Canada and spring/summer only businesses will they continue receiving that median income stipend until they can fully reopen say next spring/summer not this one? Is that more of a moot point for them while pressingly relevant to us because they were hit earlier and resolved their virus peak earlier, facilitating reopening sooner so different seasonal businesses will be effected for us; following from there, remaining to be seen is if the concept of furloughing workers only will work seeing at least one UK business already closed thanks to the pandemic, an Associated Press article noted the paying of majority portions of wages was staving off unemployment for now. Emphasis clearly on for now; what if you are among some of the last businesses permitted to open under lockdown/reopening procedures will they and their employees be supported through that entire time, if they are not how will they fare any better than the U.S. in the long haul: hint, they won’t. A better look to understand what will probably happen to varying degrees is Italy where a charity there was handing out baguette lunches and as reopening was slowly beginning business owners worried if they will survive because people just weren’t showing up to buy their products, either due to feeling unsafe or lacking discretionary funds. Shock to probably no one reading this, as the piece was being compiled the headlines were the UK in recession author of the Newser piece calling it the worst, The Associated Press reporting their public debt going up to 2 trillion pounds which explains the publicized battles over stimulus and virus aid to various parts of the government and citizenry, the entirety of the EU’s economy is contracting as cases rise again because, lo and behold, opening up in any capacity, no matter how cautious or reckless, is precisely what that gives you. Japan the country that needed no to minimal lockdown because ‘everyone was wearing a mask,’ according to summaries by the standard and independent press, is facing an economy contracting at a record rate slammed by what else these days, the pandemic. Hearing the progressive chorus of they are in recession so are we rattling off the number of people who don’t have enough to eat in a given week, the 1 to 2 thirds of Americans months behind on rent and mortgage payments, the projected 28 million people facing eviction and homelessness up from the roughly 1 million existing currently; difference is according to analysis they’ve done everything mostly right and we’ve done everything mostly wrong, outcomes virtually the same presently. At least theoretically regardless whether it could ever realistically get past a republican congress, the leader of the senate who prides himself on the nickname the grim reaper, Mitch McConnell we still have the option to nationalize wages, implement a UBI, enact a rent freeze, mortgage freeze keeping people in their homes, expand programs like food stamps, shore up diverted supply chains going to food banks; these countries have already done those things begging the question where does a country like the UK go from here? Certainly no one is done with this pandemic long term results years in the making, but early data is far from promising; remember Sweden looking like it’s Nordic fellows and European counterparts economically sans a lockdown and let’s dispense with the concept other countries aren’t doing bailouts or are somehow putting citizens farther ahead in the priority list than we are when German airline Lufthansa was petitioning the EU for more help at the end of May and by mid-June the UK was pushing back on the pandemic policy there related to air travel citing what, their bottom line, Germany’s Angela Merkel having to remind EU officials everyday counts for virus fund in early July and they are debating solidarity or frugality keeping in mind these are the countries that chose austerity over stimulus in 2008 and suffered long term for it. Amsterdam’s significant airport just announced it’s cutting several hundred jobs citing a lack of international coordination to virus response effecting flights but the EU is a coalition of countries and how many Americans travel to the Netherlands (for those who need a geography refresher) so this can’t be defacto blamed on us and independent the minute causality the overarching issue is the same the pandemic and the fact that the pandemic lead to hundreds of job cuts, surely more to be seen throughout the western world as this drags on. Contextualizing that go back up to the previous paragraph and Bill Maher’s comments on what doctors need to say about America’s weight, mocking what was in some social media circle being called the COVD 15 mimicking the freshman 15 it’s thought college freshman gain their initial year on campus as if people aren’t going to gravitate to comfort foods in times of stress even if stress eating is not a thing; maybe even if you got stimulus, filed for unemployment and or/qualify for food stamps it has changed your eating habits to cheaper unhealthier foods, even by a small percentage because it means less money to spend on groceries than you would had things not changed, uncertainty has made you keen to save what little you can scrimp where you can and the food budget is it, more than buying and eating less, buying less expensive if only slightly. First time food stamp users who had to figure out how to make the monies given stretch a month, leaving off fresh organic fruits and vegetables, the leanest cuts of meat, supply shortages making some cuts unavailable altogether, particularly the higher quality, supply problems also causing the price of staples to increase dramatically. Things that all can happen in other western countries too with the set that need all their wages to survive, relying on their nation’s version of food stamps if they qualify will change eating habits it’s merely a question of by how much and how can that impact weight; people, families abroad that are dependent on their food pantry equivalent driven by donations, whatever their fellow citizens have to spare; a few sentences ago weren’t we just talking about free baguette lunches in Italy- but Bill Maher thinks he’s onto something and has everyone listening to him believing his swill. To that point web-zine BGR billed it as the solution the US would never try basically a revolving lockdown as reopening strategy 50 days restricted 30 days normalcy if cases spike go back to the restrictions lather rinse repeat; one problem for Global Dynamic Interventions Strategies researchers who confirmed the suppositions in a viral web post A- all of zero countries are employing their method, B- there’s a simple answer for that they failed to answer fundamentals like how you run a fiscally responsible city, county, state forget a whole country if you keep having to provide government subsidies to businesses that can’t be open 50 days at a stretch, who can then only be open for 30 days after? Short answer you can’t even more true when we know a vaccine is still almost a year out and vaccinating anyone beyond frontline, essential workers will likely be well into 2022, perhaps 2023, social distancing projected to last until 2022 as early as April; serious consideration to be given to the additional strain you place on people merely trying to live their daily lives, how do you go to school for students who don’t do well with online, remote learning, those with disabilities who need the in person, one on one instruction, therapies to be their best actualized selves, how do you plan anything from a shopping day trip in a neighboring city, or a business meeting, to a vacation? Following from that how does it not become a system of regressive taxes and fines think cash bail, cities filling their coffers on excessive traffic fines al-a Ferguson when people can’t keep track of whether they can or can’t go here or there in a specific week or month, it suddenly changes due to case numbers, not to mention the outright rebellion waged by people who can’t take the constant back and forth; separating America from the equation, how is that not an attractive revenue source to countries like the UK, Italy struggling economically which lead to the election of populist leaders, who in the mist of crisis lean toward austerity, completely absent the budding authoritarians, the Hungarian situation in paragraph 1. It parallels the purported half measure by democrats to manage the looming eviction crisis as characterized by self-described loud mouth YouTuber Kyle Kulinski apoplectic their response was boiled down to giving persons facing eviction lawyers not UBI, not nationalization of wages, not a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures for the duration of the pandemic, X number of months after the declared end of the pandemic providing people a chance to get back on their feet once they can begin working again; except no matter how blundering he believes it is or how literally they stumbled into it they did attempt to provide something needed when 21 evictions were stopped in one Texas county alone when tenants took their landlord to court and documents revealed said landlord has taken CARES act COVID relief funds. Elsewhere if the landlord in another story was willing to try evicting a family at gunpoint what makes anyone think he would pay the slightest attention to an eviction moratorium; concurrently what other laws is he violating, willing to violate to do whatever he wants and how many more of his tenants could be saved with what, lawyers! The issue with the woman being evicted from her home after testing positive and having been in the hospital returning home with an oxygen tank and already advanced eviction procedures culminating in the video seen with the police surrounding her property padlock on her door, belongings on her lawn, nowhere to go isn’t the greedy entities trying to throw her out of her home in the middle of the pandemic it’s the details presented in the video that question the legality of what’s happening pandemic or no pandemic. Staring with her partner had left her the home and she apparently had paperwork proving this, next what they were coming after her property for the unpaid medical bills of the partner’s mother a full 2 years after her death; relating to the virus, how they were able to push this through with less of a fight from the women is they successfully declared the property abandoned while the woman was in the hospital, unknown if they bothered to check the hospitals during and pandemic, having gotten their paperwork in order they proceeded to bring the police in to carry out the eviction despite the local health department declaring an eviction illegal because her health status the police commenced with it anyway despite what should have happened is the police telling the evictors they needed to go back to court at minimum with the health department and sort it out, the eviction should be null and void because the property was not in fact abandoned. Everything this woman needs is encompassed in a lawyer, definitely one that isn’t going to cost her any money she predictably doesn’t have, equally everything about this scenario is fishy and merits intense legal investigation; we saw the same thing during the great recession from unscrupulous banks paying college students to illegally sign other people’s names to documents, to incomplete paperwork pushed through to eject people from their homes, people given 30 days to vacate the property removed by the police in 3. Lawyers the easiest and necessary fix on the short notice of a pandemic and resulting economic crisis when unlike criminal court people are not automatically guaranteed a lawyer, regardless ability to pay, for eviction court; Mr. Kulinski needs to acquaint himself with the concept of both and not either or, people need both UBI or nationalization of wages, plus a moratorium on eviction/foreclosure added to low costs or no cost legal representation in eviction court. One of the things not talked about enough by Kulinski is not only does their need to be a moratorium on eviction/foreclosure but in the case of renters forgiveness of missed payments so that the moment the pandemic is declared over they aren’t surprised with a bill they have no hope of paying whereas with a mortgage they can extended the missed payments on the back end. Finally on the topic changing the law so you get access to legal services for something as minimal as traffic court to a murder rap, changing the laws at the federal level so in no way can anyone do what was done to that woman on all fronts, nationalizing a uniform set of standards and processes for evictions across the country. It’s an identical case with medical bankruptcy, yes in utopia there would be no such things, pay close attention to the countries he routinely rattles off as having no such things have fractions of the population of the US, the coalition that is the EU never mind the theory Medicare for all would collapse under the weight of the poor health of most Americans, the obesity, the fast food diet, yada, yada, yada; lawyers are once more are the prescription to lessening medical bankruptcies before you can completely eliminate them even if that is your ultimate goal. First legal representation intimidates everyone in the eviction or bankruptcy, foreclosure scene into completing their paperwork and following the process, lawyers over sick people still undergoing treatment, newly released from the hospital know to request an itemized bill and can easily spot errors, hospital or other provider double billing, things that the patient’s insurance company should have covered under their plan, under the rules of Obama care, serious discrepancies in paperwork rendering the bankruptcy null and void. End result in these situations is legal representation finds the hospital, their collection agency (a topic that could fill a whole other article) guilty of illegal tactics, the insurance company, hospital negligent in recording payments made to a person’s account in an effort to pay debt owed, plus errors in billing significantly reducing the amount owed rendering bankruptcy no longer necessary, subtracting errors the amount owed has already been paid by the patient under a payment plan set up between them and the hospital/provider. At minimum the addition of a lawyer in the mix makes hospitals more willing to negotiate down amounts owed by patients in an effort to recoup some of the funds in a timely manner as opposed to costly and lengthy litigation for which the hospital/provider could be on the hook for court fees; why free legal services in such instances are so important and shouldn’t be so carelessly dismissed. Another heralded progressive necessity required in America at least 2 weeks of paid leave where other countries get much more vacation and sick time by their laws, unfortunately like Medicare for all in the previous paragraph it’s much more complicated than initially perceived, outside a pandemic Kulinski and likeminded thinkers assume people would take it when studies show offered time off by employers is not taken by employees for a variety of reasons fearing stigma, being removed from promotion tracks being the top 2 along with retuning to mountains of work piled up while you were gone, fear of being fired for a perceived harder working employee if they use all their allotted time. Somewhat presumptuous is that absent all those other things the vast majority would want paid vacation time vs. sick or family leave maternity/paternity leave, that there aren’t people in every country that are workaholics by nature that’s just how they’re wired; working, keeping busy is how they stay out of jail avoid relapsing on their addiction, maintaining their mental health. Take Japan where 2020 marked the first time a top cabinet official took available maternity leave at the birth of his first child then only taking 2 weeks where Japanese law provides up to a year between both parents, said leave taken by only 6% of men. And if you think culturally induced overwork is bad in America check out the suicide rate in japan from their work culture; yes I’m talking to you Kyle Kulinski. America or other country even with the vacation and leave times given there would be people who contracted COVID and had already used their vacation for an actual vacation, used sick time to deal with a sick spouse, child or children at different times throughout the year, like fiscal budgets not always turning over at the beginning of the calendar year, thus needing an emergency leave to not show up at work and still have a job, not to mention income to get by for the minimum 2 weeks you must isolate to recover, to say nothing of those potentially exposed who must do the same. To be talked about on several fronts is virus shaming going well beyond the man and his wife here where he got COVID on a cruise, in the early days of the pandemic before they were banned, she never had it but both received death threats, she was ostracized at work, people who have recovered and find those they used to interact with at work or outside of it avoiding them; outside the US the shaming of equator’s patient zero, the Asian man who was dubbed grandpa tan because his grocery trip infected several in his nation, another man with the unwanted distinction of being responsible for most of the cases in his country, but family leave, sick leave will fix this, so intone progressives. Here at home recall the protests against lockdown procedures in Michigan started when it was expanded to include preventing Wal-Mart and Target stores in the state from selling non-essential items among them carpeting, furniture, paints, gardening supplies, fertilizer and said that people couldn’t go to other people’s houses for any reason. Results in some ways speaking for themselves when confusion stemming from governor Whitmer’s order caused one store to stop selling car seats in person at one store, ironically all items available in a Wal-Mart or Target available for online order through their app or website; to say nothing of if they are buying indoor/outdoor paints, furniture, carpeting, gardening materials they are more apt to stay home completing the home improvement projects they desired, plying their new outdoor hobby on their lawn, in a windowsill or box garden not violating an order they found asinine overreach to begin with. Others less immediately apparent but hardly unpredictable namely the fact you run the palpable risk of creating a food desert in already disadvantaged communities when those Wal-Mart and Target entities can’t sell enough product in specific locations to keep their doors open not only leading to hundreds of permanently unemployed workers whose jobs will never come back long after the virus is in our historical rearview mirror but a lack of a place to get groceries, why Wal-Marts and Targets were deemed essential and allowed to remain open to begin with, they sell food and toiletries, cleaning supplies, house a pharmacy in most cases where people pick up lifesaving, sustaining quality of life generating medications. It also readily proves a fundamental misunderstanding about how poor and minority communities operate best depicted by Mychal Denzel Smith’s Salon piece calling out black respectability politics and the concept of so called ‘bad blacks’ who were never as successful the likes of Chris Rock and Charles Barkley less on the robbing stores for light money or being a gang member/drug dealer but telling the others in their crew to leave the smart kid in their neighborhood alone, this round and more about the drunk uncle who fixes cars for the neighborhood so they can go to work, the woman who had 5 kids out of wedlock and is by definition a societal pariah for that and her use of welfare spending her time tailoring clothing, doing hair for people in the neighborhood going to job interviews, likely now for frontline/ essential workers who are African American and salons are closed, who aren’t fixing those cars to go to work but to sit in a food bank line for groceries, at the unemployment office for a paper application because the website keeps crashing or your only access to a computer and internet is the library then closed if not now presently depending on what region of the country you live in. All trying to make sure others have better than they do, to Smith’s main argument, because in the shadow of white supremacy there isn’t room at the table for everyone so bad blacks do what they do so the ones with the greatest chance get that chance. What was so infuriating about the progressive reaction to lockdown protests David Pakman talking about the ‘Fox News tool’ complaining about an inability to get her nails done and an inability to return clothing to stores due to the shutdowns of most retail business posing the rhetorical question to his audience if these were the type of questions grand kids were going to ask their grandparents years from now about our current moment in history resigned sarcasm suggesting it would be the furthest question from their minds. Flabbergasted in another video there was an older man crying over fertilizer or more specifically that he could no longer buy it at Wal-Mart telling his listeners/viewers hardware stores were open he could go elsewhere and get it missing entirely that people were being told too to limit their comings and goings, the number of people they were around and that they sell fertilizer at the Wal-Mart so why not continue doing so? Ana Kasparian of The Yong Turks independent media news network regularly doing a mock whinny voice of protesters who are predominately white yes but the principle still stands saying I want to get my hair done. It’s not about nails, or returning pants, or hair, it’s first and foremost about the disruption of daily life, next about returning those pants to use the money in your gas tank to drive to that food bank or unemployment office be able to sit in hours long lines to get food or benefits to buy food, pay the light, gas and water if not the rent mortgage; does the Fox News tool know that probably not, should Pakman, Ms. Kasparian unquestionably and having the platform they do should say so. As stated most of the protesters talked about were white middle aged to older persons, one showing off her roots to emphasize why she needs her hair done never a word mentioned about the black and minority individuals who are frontline workers and continue to need he hair management and maintenance that has been a part of their life since toddlerhood in part to keep their job, essential worker status why so many African American and other minorities keep getting and dying from the virus; those few lucky enough to be able to work from home using Face time, Skype and zoom for work likewise can’t be seen as unkempt if they wish to remain employed. CNN’s Don Lemon lashing out at said protesters on behalf of frontline workers asking quote “who the hell do you think you are” in response to their demands for ice cream (picture of protester holding sign in front of a Baskin Robins) counter question, who the hell is doing your hair since you are seen in studio every night your program is on air, is CNN keeping the hair and makeup staff, we saw Anderson Cooper’s foray into bad haircuts but not yours. Moreover being an African American you uniquely understand the far reaching implication of barber shop and salon closures for your community when they are doing blood pressure and blood sugar checks, wellness clinics on various topics for those who will see their hair care professional but not step foot into a doctor’s office yet all we hear on that is crickets similar to Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms declaring she knows exactly what goes on in a hair/nail salon, her family having owned one, exactly why she doesn’t want them open again not one word about the necessary hair maintenance for people of color. All at a time when only a hand full of cities across the country have passed legislation about natural hair and the fact you can’t fire someone for their ethnic hair, hair style; a recent story from a reporter was talking about like it or not a particular type of braid was indeed professional styling for black female reporters. The little girl whose story went viral for sitting the barber chair calling herself so ugly was included here because she was at the home or business of a family friend probably because said friend was doing it at a reduced cost or free of charge highlighting how those in poorer communities get their basic needs met alongside orders like governor Whitmer’s saying don’t go to anyone’s home for any reason inarguably an order medical experts think should have applied to the whole country should be applied as we need to lockdown again doing it completely and right the second time when they may be an essential worker going to their neighbor to wash clothes because they don’t have a washing machine and their neighbor does. Dovetailing into whose providing all the IT support for workers working from home, how has it been so ‘successful’ minus company IT support undergirding most startups who have graduated to office space; who is teaching these older workers how to use Skype, Facetime and Zoom they had no need to use on their jobs previously, never mind family households where there is one computer for everyone’s use, persons who can’t work from home not because there job is incompatible with working remotely but rather they are part of the 32% of Americans who find the internet too complicated to use or the 34% who until now deemed at minimum the parts they suddenly need for work irrelevant to their lives down to the 20% who can’t afford actual hardware of a PC or the home internet fees? Out of college there were jobs I didn’t take because hard and fast deadlines mean a need for more reliable internet than I knew I would ever have a backup plan I knew I couldn’t formulate with the limited resources I have to this day. People caught between a rock and a hard place needing to make a living but concerned about their privacy as the computers their bosses let them take, home had them buy now come with key loggers and other spying capabilities, using a worker’s on home device activation of video chat services to spy or keep tabs on workers, jumping off into a whole set of other problems in western world work cultures not confined to America. Remaining to be seen is if America will be better off over the long haul because we did not expect the government to provide a UBI, protect wages and jobs as done in other countries, we, having revamped if not invented the gig economy, are now well versed in the sides hustle, changing jobs every few years quickly becoming the norm as relentless as it is, millennials and older gen Zers regularly turning hobbies into extra cash or full on careers providing greater bounce back potential.

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The international community has a role to play here which they have abjectly been largely derelict in for an elongated period of time well preceding COVID 19; for instance why are we praising nations, independent territorial entities like South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, even Singapore in the beginning, for their timely and effective pandemic response when they can’t get their regional neighbors, their cultural cohorts i.e. China to stop using, to indeed ban so called wet markets the world over, not just there. And no it is not a mainstream media racist trope to blame such places when virologists who study these things pinpoint the probability; if Fortune magazine is wrong and it is not China’s food supply spelling their constant battle with disease, diseases that Kyle Kulinski accurately articulated came from the middle east, Mexico and other areas of the world, what is, noting people travel relentlessly to the United States too from all parts of the world as well and we have never seen the disease spread with which China routinely grapples? Further for all that people like Kulinski want to compare eastern world, Asian and elsewhere wet markets to American and other factory farms calling the conditions just as deplorable, just as likely to generate disease and co-opting the I don’t want to eat anything that had a face crowd pushing beyond the ethical treatment of animals particularly those going on our table to vegetarianism, veganism; American factory farms have never generated the scale of disease China’s wet markets do, China over all does, mad cow in the UK is a disease originating in the animal. Post things like bird flu in food animals, tests and controls have been put in place that at most leads to euthanizing poultry and chicken stock. Closely examining places such as China we have to understand exactly why it is they are so good at this, it isn’t merely boiled down to their largely authoritarian rule, more centralized government, even the alarmingly blind trust citizens put in their leaders to take appropriate action, to protect them willing to, in South Korea’s case, sacrifice elements of privacy for that safety rather they’ve dubiously had so much practice; owing to every few years every epidemic level disease hits there first or eventually. Their PPE never has a chance to get old, infectious disease practices never have a chance to be forgotten because they are continuously in use, Vietnam despite its proximity to China and fears of spread reported thousands of infections and kept their deaths to numbers with double digits; why, temperature checks and health monitoring were decidedly old hat having regular battles with diseases like Dengue fever, hazard of tropical climates rife with mosquitos and an abundance of international travel from surrounding tropical areas, quarantines and so called fever clinics, warehousing either the exposed who can’t safely isolate at home or the sick who can’t do the same including aforementioned travelers is everyday operation for them. It’s a similar conversation with masks in the western world, America and Europe compared to Asia separated entirely from the South Korean doctor/disease expert saying the biggest mistake other parts of the world were making was not regularly wearing masks in public while neither he nor the interviewer were wearing a mask; we, the world, needs to start to understand why masks are not only culturally acceptable but culturally ingrained in their people, our air quality isn’t the consistency of spitting pea soup in The Exorcist thick to where you must wear a mask to protect yourself from smog pollution and particulates as China has been throughout the 80’s, 90’s and as late on the historical timeline as 2014. We don’t have to cancel school or force indoor recess upon students because the air quality is too hazardous for them; nowhere in the U.S., Europe, even our most populous cities like NYC, are people packed in on top of each other the way they are in countries like Japan, apart from China and their controversial one child policy to try curbing their, in the billions, population. We don’t have professional pushers to shove people onto over packed subways like well-dressed sardines, a job in the former nation; meaning of course you need a mask to protect yourself and others when if you cough or sneeze in the slightest your putting your germs all over someone else in an exaggerated way, if someone coughs or sneezes the least little bit you have an excess of someone else’s germs all over you. Cataloging the totality of that information the question shouldn’t be why are western world persons resistant to mask wearing, embedding the psychological message there is something wrong with their face, their body, instilling the idea that if you don’t wear a mask there is something about you that could kill someone else, the question is why has mask wearing became normal there and not seen as the red flag oddity that it should be both to them and the on-looking globe; commenter on a U.S. news story rightfully questioning what is happening if they wear masks and masks are so effective why the rampant disease? “Mask God I hate that word China and Japan has been wearing mask for ever everything they do have have on a mask but yet they still got the virus want to tell us how that happened [ Sic.] Regarding that collective community mindset referenced by too many progressives blaming red state leaders, Trump supporters and selfishness versus other countries sense of collective community implying people won’t wear them primarily because it helps someone else not themselves, reflect carefully on what a commenter on a Kyle Kulinski video stated pertaining to Asia and eastern culture, Kulinski who’s latest assertion is if we all wore masks like Japan there would have been no need for lockdown, the economic pain experienced by Europe and the US: “To explain Japan for you Kyle (remember back a semester ago to an Asian politics class) Japan is a part of four subculture main groups of the East , which also includes China , Korea and Vietnam (all also have influences from confucianism) Becuase of the influence of confucianism either directly as in the case with china , vietnam and korea or indirectly shintoism for example all these state share a history of a hierarchy of a stable society. “A stable family creates a stable society which then creates a stable empire” this summarizes how heirarchys are seen in confucianism as a positive good for all in a society , very early collectivism. So , in Japan knowing now its early cultural history was a psuedo form of collectivism and an acceptance for a hierarchy , we now see why Japan (along with modern day south korea) were able to quickly control the virus , with populace that actually followed procedures to social distance and be cautious when going outdoors. People in Eastern countries understand the meaning of a society. Which is what they. as their worldviews and descions based off of. Whereas the West focuses on individuality and John Lockes natural law. The East focuses on Confucianism and the meaning of a collective autocratic society” [Sic] Assuming commenter 2 is half right forget singular societies, separate cultures humanity is not a collective and that’s a good thing for we aren’t yet living in a parallel to the Star Trek universe, COVID 19 mitigation procedures aren’t the Borg and resistance isn’t futile. Pivoting back to America on the subject of masks, setting aside the shortages and infectious disease specialist Dr. Fauci’s (the Trump administrations medical expert participating in briefings meant to educate the public about the pandemic) admission the reason the American public was warned off wearing masks was severe shortages, there are the practical and societal realities of asking the populous to wear one, progressives utterly failing to ask some critical questions about the dynamics blog and author laid out, listening to what people are saying about why they won’t wear a mask that obviously did not come from a social media meme, Facebook conspiracy theory; like how is it helping others if a mask makes you cough, sneeze, more/repeatedly rendering it useless at containing the droplets, which was the point of wearing a mask, because it’s already soaked. When Rachel Maddow’s profile of CDC meatpacking plant guidelines talks about giving workers replacement ones throughout their day when it becomes wet, dirty or hard to breathe through; already tips for summer including packing multiple masks to switch out when sweat soaks through them. How does it help others if you can’t get one that fits properly and is constantly exposing your nose defeating the purpose, how does it help others if on a windy day it blows off your face, you are an older person, person with a physical disability who can’t chase it down forcing someone somewhere to have contact with it when you could be asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic? How are you protecting yourself even in the slightest when COVID can live on a mask for 7 days as detailed by the web-zine BGR, when further cleaning procedures for cloth or disposable masks assumes unfettered access to a washing machine and the ownership of things like a clothing iron not common in all households; principals across the nation partnering with washer and dryer makers to put machines in school when they discovered rampant absenteeism was due to shame over dirty clothes and parents choosing between their electric bill and food for their child/children, groceries and money for the laundry mat? As if people suddenly have money to invest in the iron not to mention a washer/dryer set if they don’t already have one; situations that could be playing out for some across the western world with the very people blog and author pointed out needed 100% of their income to get by, who without it are struggling. How is it protecting you the wearer if it causes you to touch your face more due to itching, discomfort, adjusting it to keep it on, exactly the opposite of what doctors are telling people to do- but wear a mask! One of secondary reasons masks were initially not recommended was a false sense of security it might give the wearer who would then become lax about both social distancing and hand hygiene; several persons asked experts what to do when they can’t understand or be understood when talking with a mask on, response maintain that 6 feet of social distance nothing else. How do you recognize persons on the street from friends to those you were congregating with for a business meeting; saw this outside a Wal-Mart the other day, 2 men make eye contact person 2 thinking he recognizes person 1, not until he got far enough away to remove his mask did he know who was looking so intently at him. We won’t even get into god forbid you are the victim of crime and the person is wearing a mask in accordance with city/state ordinances rendering both video and facial recognition nearly useless, witness description out the window – but wear a mask. Taking entirely too long see through masks allowing the deaf and hard of hearing to read lips conducting needed interactions with their world or NICU babies to see their parent’s faces and respond, bond and grow, few clear masks or face shields in other countries serving these purposes and more in the stock footage/ news videos praising their pandemic response compared to ours. All of no one answering whose buying all these masks when until my own July trip to my local Wal-Mart I didn’t know they sold masks, on a display section at the front of the store not back with medical or hygiene supplies, and they cost 16-17.95 for a box of 25 surgical type disposable masks; again a scenario impacting the poor, lower economic classes throughout the western world when they are only getting X percentage of their income, return to the video on South Korea’s conquering of corona virus adults there getting 3 per week provided by the government, day you pick them up organized by birthdate. No information given on if masks are washable, if so why the effort for distribution and so many so frequently, if disposable nothing given about what people do the other 4 days per week they need to go to work or elsewhere. Next to be called out are doctors willing to go on national TV news programs never hesitating to call out the president and the political polarization of masks when it shouldn’t be in the middle of a pandemic, by that same token who never address the resistance to masks voiced by ordinary people not behaving akin to cult members, who are not swathed in conspiracy theories but having genuine difficulties with masks. Many, many citing labored breathing present with a mask, disappearing without, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes mentioning the claustrophobia it evokes, mild in him worse in others; what kind of example are doctors setting when an inside a hospital serge of COVID 19 video shows a doctor yank her mask down to yell at staff to bring her supplies in order to put a patent on a ventilator, on the other hand how else is she to quickly request the supplies she needs to save a patient. Another doctor demonstrating in the 2 minutes of a nearly 9 minute video everything wrong with trying to comply with mask orders especially if you are a larger person, excluding obesity but a person built to play football, larger body, head and face, if you are a person of color characteristic wide, flat nose, as it wouldn’t stay on his nose for the life of him during the press conference; nose research shows being a high point of spread, why it’s imperative to keep it covered. Shouting due to equal parts emotion and attempting to overcome mask garble led to him literally pulling it up on his face every few words as he spoke for that 2 minutes, negating completely the don’t touch your face rule, yet they wonder after watching that why people just give up and say to heck with masks. No MD or mental health professionals giving basic advice how to overcome anxiety around wearing a mask, how to make use of telehealth, apps to access mental health services to confront your issue with masks or other pandemic trigged psychological issues, surpassing debunking of misinformation that masks cause lower oxygen levels, that breathing in your own expelled air (carbon dioxide) is dangerous — both probably circulated on Facebook pages and conspiracy theory hubs when people had trouble breathing through one, educated assumption it was lowering their oxygen level, already knowing carbon dioxide is harmful to breathe, knowing that’s what you expel out on exhale in their minds putting 2 and 2 together— providing guidance about when it’s time see a doctor about an underlying respiratory issue you don’t know you have, but everyone who doesn’t wear a mask is a selfish, science ignorant deplorable. On the contrary these are, in multiple cases, people who have a rudimentary understanding of science and an instinctual comprehension breathing expelled air isn’t ideal, people who would be justifiably fearful if the virus can live on the mask for 7 days; and while the misinformation it lowers oxygen levels, leads to hypoxia bullet points aren’t true the Canadian press had an article about bacteria on masks especially in the summer heat, unmentioned, questions about preventing bacterial infections from masks unanswered, solution wash cloth masks regularly. Still we saw a precursor to this with the canvas grocery bags meant to slowly replace plastic and the E. Coli and salmonella on them people having to be told to wash them, have separate bags for meat and other items, bags for groceries versus other uses for such totes; doctors forgetting they’re doctors and learned how to wear masks, disregard discomfort in medical school, we didn’t. Derelict in the utmost at consistently telling people when to go to the hospital if they are having an emergency, whether that’s suspected COVID, heart attack, stroke or other issue, in the beginning so good at messaging stat home they took it too literally and now dealing with the fallout. Circling back around to masks and why they became such a volatile issue, worse Dr. Vin Gupta was on MSNBC later in the pandemic announcing a study saying bandana and t-shirt masks are totally ineffective after others told us to use a face covering, any face covering we could find or jerry rig without answering where people are supposed to get all these masks amidst a shortage globally that still exists. So now not only is there public confusion on wearing a mask who it helps, who it doesn’t and how much, we’re having debates fuelled by doctors about which type of mask is effective for the civilian population adding credence to the people who don’t want to wear them if the first place if doctors can’t make any more sense than they are now; especially when they know they are there to compensate for a president who is not providing the leadership and information they want to see in allowing experts to speak for the federal government, provide people with direction. All of the above added to the genuine confusion over types of masks including the ones with vents that all they do is allow your expelled droplets out precisely what you don’t want; doctors seemingly unaware of the cautions and warnings that come with N-95 and N-100 masks a segment of a weather channel piece talking about them saying consult a doctor before use if you hay heart or lung issues, much the same found on the pack of surgical masks I bought online from Wal-Mart when my city passed a mandatory mask order in July advising people not to use them in low air quality and use with caution if you have severe asthma or respiratory issue. Doctors everywhere who have been notoriously behind the 8 ball on everything to do with this regardless what country they are from Italy’s physicians taking too long to figure out they could modify scuba masks to help people while nurses here were wishing for c-pap machines usually used with sleep apnea to provide some relief to less ill patients. Ones on networks like MSNBC who need to be up to date before they speak including the one shouting they wanted Dr. Fauci opinion about stopping quarantine after 14 days when we see people shedding virus for much longer acting as if he had not heard the South Korea study information on contagious periods; backed up by surface testing able to detect the virus but not if it’s alive or dead. Doctors who took their sweet time providing the American people any kind of guide as to things they can do and how to do them as safely as possible forget the Whitehouse, federal government, the difference between a huge house party and meeting outdoors while wearing masks; doctors who failed to while appearing on TV to adequately warn against memorial day parties despite that being the unofficial start of summer or who never clearly and repeatedly said Americans had a choice between opening bars in the summer and opening schools I the fall. Granted they plainly didn’t expect president Trump to suddenly demand their opening; however, it would have put the decision in the hands of the American people dictated by their behavior, instead we’re in the mess we are now exacerbated by a president who wants to rush ahead at every step. Panning out to that global lens again known human activities contribute to the prevalence of disease jumping, mutating from animal to human transmission, what is thought to have happened with COVID 19 via bats, and either someone ate a bat or consumed meat from an animal who ate an infected bat, activities like deforestation ravaging critical places like the Amazon as people burn trees and vegetation to clear spaces for farming or cattle grazing; true various countries have tried to implore nations containing the beautiful rainforest to battle the fires and cease the behaviors leading it its eminent, total destruction but all that yielded was the Brazilian president getting into a snarky war of words with the French president while the Amazon continued to burn. Globally here again it must be asked if America is producing students so bad a math and science not only why do they have one of the vaccine candidates closest to success in human trials but then where are the major scientific accomplishments of the rest of the world, where are the vaccines, potential vaccines for things like Dengue fever, malaria, there was a time all capable nations were working on AIDS treatments and possible cures with the fervor, the approach COVID 19 so why is there not yet an AIDS vaccine, no longer a discussion of one, Lyme disease and rookie mountain spotted fever ravage the U.S. and tick prone areas the world over but getting accurate diagnosis and treatment of either is the source of horrific medical mistake stories, no vaccine forthcoming in the foreseeable future extracting the tied up resources focused on COVID 19. Finland may hold the reputation for the best schools but until COVID and their rapid test what were they doing with it, other countries have a sense of community alright their own national community perhaps hardly extending to the rest of the world as evidenced by the lack of medical innovation not singularly vaccines themselves. Look closely at the WHO beyond seeming to tow China’s line, carry China’s water on pandemic related issues, unto the point of letting wet markets reopen despite educated speculations on the source of the pandemic, China’s latest pop up outbreak of COVID was where an open food market; and now the most up to date information is scientist sounding the alarm about yet another potential pandemic level disease out of where, China again, fast moving information, a pneumonia more severe than COVID 19. Adding to the substantiated worries a case of plague was also found in, if you can’t guess it by now… China. China who well remembered blood type affected the severity of symptoms in SARS cases COVID 19 quite similar yet there was nothing forwarded to the medical community, no comment from the WHO on extra precautions needed by people with severe symptom corresponding blood types (s); information the latter entity should have freely given seeing as the represent the world in medical matters. They saw what was happening in the US with testing, the lag when the CDC created test failed yet they had tests available for us to use if we wanted them, foolish for us not to take them, but why not call up state chapters of the CDC and say where would you like me to send them, divide the allotted number we could access between all 50 states and US territories, send them specifically to hot spot areas, why was the UK slowed down from testing its citizens having to again develop a test from scratch, why not send the blue print schematic specifications of how to make and operate the test approved by the global agency to every nation on the planet starting with their representative offices/officials in each nation, where they don’t have those coordinating with aide work agencies to get developing and small nations to give directions and supplies to make test both for the disease and anti-body testing. Assumedly the actual workers at the CDC could follow directions on how to take the tests sent said blueprints; utterly different than the progressive ideas when confronted with the knowledge Russia and China were attempting to hack COVID research suggesting we just give it to them so they can save their citizens too; Russia demonstrating exactly why we don’t conduct ourselves that way open source research in such a way they rushed to announce to the world they had a COVID 19 vaccine they were distributing to their populous, president Putin touting his daughter had received it. Problem it’s not phase 3 trial tested on vast numbers of people so its safety remains a gigantic question mark illustrating independent media personality John Iadarola the drastic gulf between handing over unfinished, incomplete research data and a finished product schematic, guide or outline wherein you follow the given directions using the given list of supplies and you get a specific product whether that’s a basic corona virus test that takes a day or 2 to get results back a rapid test, an anti-body test or a vaccine. It’s the same thing with the doctors on TV again yelping for months about we don’t have enough testing, we need more testing highlighting testing has actually gone done here in the states even as cases rise; only recently getting specific about the kind of test they are talking about apparently had in other countries that function akin to litmus paper, put a saliva sample on it, if it reacts you’re positive if not you’re negative; A- if they are had why are they hiding it like proprietary knowledge of a consumer product not a medical need in a pandemic emergency, yet America is the disgrace. B- why are we the American public getting this level of detail only now so we know what to tell our local and national leaders to push for in legislation, was funding for this in the heroes act passed by the United States house of representatives, was it known about then or will they need more funding to do this lone thing because other parts are earmarked for individual parts of relief, medical supply, should it ever get to let alone be passed by the senate. Judging by their equally bumbling actions of course president Trump wants to pull America out of the WHO when first they issue a statement attempting to differentiate between asymptomatic persons and pre-symptomatic people with regards to the disease and it come out unintelligible word salad previously only witnessed in the severely cognitively impaired, mentally ill or Donald Trump himself well before you get to the accent of the representative speaking; to say nothing of those definitions meaning wholly different things to the medical, scientific and research communities versus the average, everyday individual sewing yet more confusion into a complex enough situation. Then it takes 200 something plus doctors from a multitude of medically advanced countries to pressure the WHO into publically announcing what was suspected from virtually the beginning, there has been sound evidence for, for months indicating COVID 19 is airborne and survives in the air much longer than previously hoped explaining why people who go to bars, restaurants, political rallies and anything enclosed indoors end up getting sick, how one man was in an elevator and sickened 70, 45 sick and 2 dead from a choir practice where social distancing was attempted. Forget the scientist who says social distancing is ineffective against airborne contagion, those who now say 26 feet is more the need for social distancing, the Canadian doctor who says yes on an individual level masks do help and we probably should all be wearing masks, yet on a population level there just isn’t the data to support the benefits bring touted and projected while we have people dying from mask confrontations in multiple countries only slated to get worse as revolving lockdowns wear on people’s patients. Now maybe Germany and the likes of Kyle Kulinski are correct and reform is the better path but then again maybe not when Italy demanded war reparations from China over the virus and the WHO’s only solution to global obesity numbers rising, well before the devastation of COVID was more bariatric surgery to ‘save’ lives independent regular readers knowing people’s metabolisms revert back to their original pre-surgical state after 5 years; the WHO looking like another entity that can’t be trusted.