re: OT: Alabama Coronavirus Thread (see link in OP for case numbers and death totals in AL)

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Actually a lot of people are morons and won't follow good common sense advice about taking precautions.

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I really haven't seen that. Everyone has been polite, kept their distance, and about half wear masks....and I have been shopping at Walmart and Home Depot. I do the same and use spray alcohol every time I go. I'm not afraid and do not feel the need to hide in my house.

What if we’ve been missing the easiest, most reliable way to detect people who need treatment all along?

Silent hypoxia

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That's not how this works. There is no "getting through it quickly" absent a huge, immediate, spread. The virus doesn't magically vanish by shutting down small businesses and commanding middle to upper class workers to stay inside for a couple months. The whole point of the government shutdowns was to "flatten the curve" below healthcare capacity to avoid unnecessary deaths from a lack of equipment or personnel, not to eliminate deaths altogether. We are well below that point, which means the government shutdowns are prolonging, not shortening, the duration of the virus.

The only reason to continue this madness would be if a vaccine was imminent, but that is not the case. It could be years away.

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If schools stay closed I do not care what other orders are lifted. Parents will stay since many can not afford child care outside of their kids attending school. And before anyone argues that go look over the past few years like when teachers went on strike and the parents had to stay home as many business could not open.

Go ahead and open whatever you want but if you do not have to staff to stay open it does not matter. People with income will not be buying anything either.

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Absent an effective vaccine, which may be YEARS away, we HAVE to "re-ignite this thing" to a certain degree in order to have it run its course. Eliminating small business and burying the travel, dining, service, retail, and transportation industries is only prolonging the inevitable at ENORMOUS cost to people's livelihoods and mental health. Unless of course we intend to keep all these restrictions in place until a vaccine is researched, tested, approved, distributed, and administered to hundreds of millions of people. How long do you think that will take?

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Earliest vaccine will be at best summer of 21. But with many orders being lifted or with fewer restrictions be placed these small businesses coming back open will not be doing the business they were before for a while. Which means they also will not be rehiring or bringing back all their employees either. So yes open up a strip mall back up but will still not see the business it needs until June or later in the summer.

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MeeMaw had a chance to actually lead the way for once, and she totally dropped the ball.

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It has been painfully obvious for years that Ivey is not a leader. Yet she was still re-elected without even having to debate her views, which is ridiculous.

Elections have consequences. And I'm not necessarily talking about the general. There were some good options for governor on the R side this past cycle, but the voters took the lazy option.

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Elections have consequences. And I'm not necessarily talking about the general. There were some good options for governor on the R side this past cycle, but the voters took the lazy option.

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Alabama voters usually take the lazy option. Look at who we’re about to elect as Senator. Tuberville is basically following Ivey’s playbook. It’s quite amazing that Kay Ivey ended up being our Governor considering she is a lifelong with very little skill and just failed her way up while the voters never held her to any kind of standard.

Can’t believe Walt, Battle, etc. let Ivey just coast into office. They all ran such milquetoast campaigns. Sure, the state was a little election fatigued following the Senate race but they never had a sense of urgency. It also doesn’t help that we really don’t have good media in this state. The only contrarians are a bunch miserable douchebags like Archibald and Josh Moon. The talk radio crowd in Bham are too concerned with access to really go hard after Ivey.

Ainsworth has really pissed me off this last month and it doesn’t matter if I agree with him or not. He’s been using the pandemic to get attention.

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Earliest vaccine will be at best summer of 21. But with many orders being lifted or with fewer restrictions be placed these small businesses coming back open will not be doing the business they were before for a while. Which means they also will not be rehiring or bringing back all their employees either. So yes open up a strip mall back up but will still not see the business it needs until June or later in the summer.

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You are really missing the point of his posts. It's not about a sudden return to normalcy. He's saying that this is a novel virus. There is no cure. There is no proven treatment. There are only two ways it will ever end. 1. You get a vaccine (which is at least a year away, if it is even possible, or 2. Develop herd immunity.

What everyone has forgotten wince this thing started, especially the idiots on facebook screaming about the "openers" just wanting to cause more deaths, is that WE ARE GOING TO HAVE THE SAME NUMBER OF PEOPLE DIE FROM THIS. The whole point of shutdowns was to "flatten the curve" to avoid overwhelming hospitals. Once the curve is flattened (and this will be easy to see in the data) you relax your shutdowns. How long it takes to return to normal is absolutely irrelevant to this.

Germany, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, and other European countries are currently reopening, because they have flattened the curve. Sweden took a different approach. They told elderly people to stay home, and sick people to quarantine themselves, and let everyone else continue to live normally. They were banking that that was enough to keep their hospitals from being overwhelmed and hoping they would become the first country in the world with herd immunity which would make put them ahead of everyone else when the next wave hits.

Regardless, the area under both curves is the same. Everybody who was going to die is still probably going to die, just at a later date.



Memaw is right about making sure the data shows that cases are steadily declining before opening it up. But once we are sure we aren't going to crash our hospital system, it's time to adapt Sweden's policy. Keep your grandparents at home. If you're sick stay home. If you're healthy, start trying to get your life back, no matter how long it takes you.

ETA - You can downvote the part about Memaw being right all you want, but it's true, although I think she should probably evaluate it county by county. Mobile clearly doesn't have it's shite together yet.

Oh, and buy a pulse oximeter. That article was fascinating.

Vaccine possible Q1 of 2021.

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You can downvote the part about Memaw being right all you want, but it's true

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Memaw was wrong to close small retailers while letting box stores stay open with 50% capacity limits. She caused massive financial hardship on them and did little to nothing of significance to slow community spread. That alone should cost her any chance at re-election should she choose to run again.

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I think she should probably evaluate it county by county.

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Absolutely, and should have from day 1.