Don’t mention the stats
Trump points out that if we stopped looking for the coronavirus we wouldn’t find so much of it so then the stats would look better. Can’t argue with him there.
“If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, actually,” the president said during a roundtable event for seniors.
Well no that’s not quite right. He was so close. We wouldn’t have very few cases – we would know about very few cases. Different thing.
I wonder if he knows that. I wonder if he knows that’s a different thing. Does he think he disappears when he closes his eyes?
The president expressed a similar sentiment in March, telling Fox News that he didn’t want infected patients from a cruise ship to disembark because it would increase the number of reported cases in the US.
“I like the numbers being where they are,” Trump said at the time. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”
His comment on Monday comes as multiple states across the country are seeing spikes in confirmed cases as they relax social-distancing guidelines and begin reopening their economies.
And he wants the spikes to be kept a secret so that the states can keep relaxing the guidelines and reopen their economies.
No, he thinks everybody else does.
Our state has been reopening, and we have a spike in cases. Of course. From a biological standpoint, that was predictable, especially since about 75-90% of the people I see have stopped wearing masks, and don’t worry about coming right up on you, except they do still follow the marks on the floor and stay six feet behind in the line (except for the occasional rogue person who violates personal space bigly). For some reason, people seem to think social distancing means I stand six feet behind you in line, but when it is side by side, such as coming down an aisle that is smaller than six feet side to begin with, they can waltz right past you (inches away). Or jam their car nearly into your butt while they reach around you to get the can of beans off the shelf before you realize they are there.
The only place in town I saw guidelines followed to the letter was Walgreens. I was in there the other day, and there was only one customer masked – me. The employees were masked, but I saw at least one of them with his mask pulled down to his chin, so his nose and mouth were free. Yeah, that does a lot of good. And the aisles were swarming with people, so I had to duck and dodge to get to the pharmacy. If I hadn’t needed something besides my prescription, I could have gone through the drive-thru, but I didn’t worry much because Walgreens has been so safe…until this weekend. It’s…horrifying.
I keep hearing the phrase “quarantine fatigue”. People are tired of wearing masks, social distancing, etc, so they just figure they don’t need to do it anymore, apparently. We did that, it was fun while it lasted, time to move on to the next thing…let’s go insult some women on the internet. Without wearing our face masks, of course. (I know face masks aren’t needed for the internet; it is just rhetorical.)
Having never progressed beyond the toddler stage, he almost certainly does think that, or something very close to it. What he believes is the truth, is whatever he wants to be true at whatever moment he thinks of it. So that is how he thinks the world ought to work. We’ve all noticed the terrible tantrums he throws when the world doesn’t work the way he wants it to. It’s personal. He doesn’t remotely care about the people to whom the statistics relate. He doesn’t want numbers that make him look bad. If he decides no-one is going to die as a direct result of attending his rallies, they mustn’t; so when they do, it’s a personal affront to him.
I had the same thought. He does think like a toddler, especially when it comes to other minds, and this is of course an Other Minds issue. If nobody knows there are X many cases, then there aren’t X many cases. When I don’t know a thing, thinks Donald, that thing doesn’t exist, so when I want that to apply to everyone else, it does.
I’m recovering from COVID-19. I had symptoms for 18 days and a full month later, I’m nowhere near where I was before I got sick. I get that people are feeling the pain of the lockdown orders, but what do they think is going to happen to the economy when 30 or 40% of the workforce is out of commission for a month or longer? I mean, forget the deaths (most states have already shrugged that off), but good luck running your business without any employees.
Chris @#4: So sorry to hear that. I hope you’re much better soon. I know this must be tough; I’ve had that sort of recovery time from other respiratory illnesses that were severe, and it’s difficult to handle. I hope you don’t mind if I don’t send you thoughtsandprayers, though. Thoughts, maybe. They won’t help any more than thoughtsandprayers, but just know we wish you well.
Somehow we seem to have gotten the idea as a country (or at least in parts of it, the part I inhabit) that if something bad hasn’t happened to us yet, it isn’t going to happen. We missed it. So some people are willing to go out and stop doing the things that kept them from getting COVID, because they have decided they wont’ get it. I guess. I can’t comprehend the thinking.
I”m tired of lockdown, too. I want to go to theatre, actually go to work now and then, be able to meet face to face with my writing group instead of by Zoom…lots of things. But I also want to live, and will accept inconvenience. For a lot of people I know, it’s just, okay, we’ve done this. We can move on now. I don’t get it.
I sort of get it for those who are employed at jobs where they have no leave; I have been there, and it’s hell if you can’t work. But for the people I work with, who want to know how soon they can get back into their building? Because Obama doesn’t want us to? Them I don’t understand.
Ugh, sorry, Chris. Sending thoughts & thoughts & maybe a bit of a tune.
I think that the “argument” is that (as Trump is convinced and always claims) the US is doing more tests than anyone else and that is the sole reason that the number of cases is so high, so it is the other loser nations that are not seeing their cases. It’s still wrong, but not quite as stupid.
Thanks for the good wishes everyone. It’s a long road back, but I’m lucky enough that I didn’t wind up in the hospital, or worse.
It’s crazy to me that people are rationalizing this as “it’s just the flu”. Sure, you have a chance of being asymptomatic, you have a chance of having only a mild case (mine was considered “mild” by Toronto Public Health, btw), but you also have a chance of severe illness, months in the hospital, or potentially life-long damage.
But I guess it’s harder to accept that this changes everything and we had ample warning it was coming.
Chris, I am so glad to read that you managed to avoid hospital. But it is, by all accounts, a very nasty disease to those who succumb. I hope you have no long-term ill-effects from it, and recover steadily. Don’t push yourself, though – it will take time for your body to repair the damage and replace all those cells which the virus destroyed to make copies of itself. As someone who has had to live for forty-five years, and counting, with serious heart conditions following on from a viral illness in my teens, I certainly hope it didn’t trigger any serious long-term disorders.
No doubt this is also Trump’s “solution” to the problem of police brutality. If people would just stop taking and posting videos of it, the problem would “go away.” Like magic!
tigger, a viral illness in my 20s left me struggling with permanent lung damage. It apparently activated a latent asthma, or something, because I never had asthma as a child, but have suffered horribly ever since I was 25. It’s really tough to have asthma during COVID, because every attack sends me hurtling to my thermometer to make sure it’s just the same old same old. So far it has been…but I don’t get out much these days.