Topic: Corona Virus Panic/Discussion Thread

Was looking forward to Covid disappearing over here stateside after the election. No dice, I guess, after third straight day of record numbers. Weird. It's almost like the the health experts we keep in place for these exact situations know what they are talking about.

@zupertramp Lol, yeah - people actually believed the pandemic was fabricated for political purposes and would disappear after the election. I think these same people must be the ones believing the earth is flat too.

@Th3solution Hey, I’ve played Assassin’s Creed. The Earth isn’t flat, it just has a big wall around it that says “Area not available. WARNING: Desynchronization imminent”.

@zupertramp I don't know what you're talking about. Covid disappeared after Easter. Trump wouldn't lie to us about that.

Here in the states, Veteran's Day means businesses offering quite a few freebies to those who have served. Mostly this means free meals at restaurants and I wasn't sure what that would mean this year with Covid. Being that many, if not most, who take advantage of such offers are older, I wondered, would businesses offer a somewhat safer alternative to dining in? The answer seems to be no. Seems unwise.

On a side note, I was recently thinking, it really says something about the resilience of our species that we can be so dumb and still have lasted so long.

@zupertramp I’ve always had a weird relationship with Remembrance Day as it’s called over here. My great grandad fought in WW2 and married a German woman of Polish background he met over there so I have family that died on both sides of both world wars. Plus, I have loads of Irish family with, shall we say, an interesting relationship with the British Army so it’s a tough one. Poppies are also completely politicised where I’m from due to the crazy sectarianism. I do usually support the White Poppy campaign but with Covid I haven’t been out to pick one up. I did see this absolute gem on Twitter though 😂

Me: Checks phone quickly for notification, distractedly refreshes Push Square because the browser is still open, reads "Poppy People," sighs heavily, heads to search engine while ignoring entirely the original reason for checking phone.

Oh and just to clarify, your Rememberance Day is more akin to our Memorial Day. Veterans Day is just for any ol' schmuck who served... like myself.

@zupertramp Same day though! I wonder if Veterans Day is 11th November due to WW1’s armistice being that day too?

@RogerRoger Thanks. I actually spent most of my time in the military at a joint USN/RAF base in Cornwall so it seems appropriate. Though I think we thick-skulled Americans often brought the Brits there more grief than we were worth. I know I certainly did.

@nessisonett Yeah no totally, they're on the same day so in that regard yes the two days are kinda the same. It's just some do take offense over here mixing up the days or using them interchangeably. Thought I'd head off any accusations of disrespect.

lol We hit 161.5K cases in one day yesterday. We're likely going to be at 200K cases a day before the month is out.

I guess we're going to find out how viable the "herd immunity" strategy is before the vaccine even lands, eh? And still the governor of my state is resisting mask mandates, saying he won't force compliance.

America has the political stability of a third-world nation at this point, between the COMPLETE lack of leadership on all levels of government to handle a crisis that other nations have effectively curbed and the head honcho doing his best impression of a tinpot dictator who is casting the integrity of our electoral system into doubt with baseless conspiracy theories that at least 20% of the country eats up without question. And we're supposed to be a "world leader?" Ridiculous.

@Ralizah Well you are a world leader. In case numbers and deaths.

@nessisonett It's about to get vastly worse. People don't understand exponential growth, for some reason.

They'll understand when every state in the union is having to dig mass graves to deal with all of the bodies we'll be seeing soon.

@Ralizah Think of it this way, the worse Trump handles the pandemic, the less supporters he’ll have in a few months. Eventually, nobody can call it a hoax because anybody that lacks common sense will have popped their clogs before the US turned into the wasteland from Mad Max.

@Ralizah I'm actually a little hopeful our institutions are strong enough to withstand Trump. My fear now is isolated pockets of violence when reality hits MAGA country square in the face on Jan 20th.

Aside from that all I can say is amen to your post.

@zupertramp I don't think Trump's attacks on our institutions, in and of themselves, will amount to anything. Judges are throwing out his spurious lawsuits left and right. Staying in at this point is most likely a ploy to extract as much money as possible from his credulous followers, as they've been bombarded with emails begging for donations to help with legal fees to fight the "rigged" election. Of course, in the fine print, you discover that somewhere in the range of 40% of these so-called "election defense fund" donations are actually being used to pay off campaign debt. Par for the course for the most cartoonishly corrupt president ever to sit in the oval office.

btw, thanks for your service. As a vet, maybe you'll get a kick out of this story about one of Trump's poll watchers, who thinks something is very 'odd' about how many military ballots were voting for Biden. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the profound disrespect this president has shown for the men and women in our armed forces, of course.

https://www.businessinsider.com/military-veteran-vote-joe-bid...

@RogerRoger If we've discovered one thing about Americans this year, it's that, in the middle of the worst pandemic in a century, they'll find any excuse to go out in large numbers and stew in eachother's fumes. I live in a small town, and, during Halloween, the streets were literally lined with maskless people. It's nuts.

@nessisonett The only problem, for many, is if it doesn't hit them directly, they won't believe it. So basically we could see a million dead but because the vast majority still wouldn't know those people, anyone who didn't take it seriously probably still wouldn't.

Also this doesn't take into account our capacity for wholly untenable rationalizations. Like "Uncle Joe didn't die of Covid, the Clinton Foundation had him killed for speaking too much truth on Facebook." That kinda thing.

@zupertramp Yeah, I overheard a couple of guys on my bus saying that Covid was a hoax because they didn’t know anyone who have died of it. I’m fairly certain trying to explain the fallacy of that argument would have earned me a stabbing so I just ignored it. Neither of them wearing masks of course.