You’re a mess today sir?
Trump is on his way to Ypsilanti as we speak.
Hilariously, the transcript crawl renders the question about wearing a mask as “You’re a mess today at the Ford plant”? No doubt it will be corrected any minute now.
Anyway Trump of course doesn’t say he will, and does instantly change the subject. “I wanna NORmalize,” he says idiotically. Well duh, Sherlock, don’t we all; we’re not doing this because we like it. We wanna normalize too, but we also wanna stay alive so that we can enjoy the normal when it comes back, and we also wanna not kill other people, so that they can enjoy the normal when it comes back. The reason things are not normal right now is because of a novel virus that is highly contagious (though not nearly as highly contagious as the 1918 flu) and all too often fatal. Wanting things to be normal again does precisely zero to disempower that virus.
Trump squawks on:
Wunna the other things I wanna do is get the churches open. The churches are not being treated with respect by a lot of the Democrat governors. I wanna get our churches open, an wur gunna take a very strong pozzisshun on that very soon.
So I guess his plan is to tell all the governors they have to exempt churches from the no large gatherings rules, in the hope that tens of thousands of church-goers will die in the next couple of months. Seems a bizarre plan, even for him.
Estimated base R0 for covid-19 is 2.0-2.5, 1918 was 2-3, so not that different in terms of how contagious they are, but very different lethality – with the number of benign asymptomatic cases make it somewhat harder to stop covid.
Hmm, thanks. I thought I heard John Barry say with much emphasis on Fresh Air last week that the flu was far more contagious, but I must have scrambled it.
A paper now in early release estimates the original Wuhan outbreak of covid-19 had R₀ of 5.7, but I’m not promoting that estimate as one “right” value.
I’ll listen to John Barry’s interview from last week to see if he said something I don’t understand yet.
I used to be able to find transcripts of Fresh Air but I could NOT find any today. Frustrating.
He should go down in history as the most abnormal normaliser ever. Given also that Trump is the most stable genius in the world; no make that the Universe (I’m sure Trump would agree) it is a small matter to go on the negation of that statement, and from there we go to the antithesis of the negation. Are you with me?
Trump is the most stable genius.
Therefore it follows that he has to be the most unstable non-genius. The moment his non-genius side appears, it disappears just as quickly as if in a puff of smoke. Further, it is reasonable to propose that the opposite of a genius is a dickhead, which leaves Trump as the most unstable dickhead in the Universe.
QED.
I expect some university will be on the phone within 60 seconds of reading this to offer me a PhD or two in philosophy; university medals, Nobel Prizes etc etc etc to follow rapidly after.
Dave – R0 for the early stages of the outbreak would be expected to be high. It is a funny parameter, because it characterizes the reaction of human populations about as much as it characterizes a pathogen. Even if the Spanish flu and Covid-19 have precisely equal R0, they get there two very different ways. Covid-19 spreads very effectively because of the asymptomatic cases that people don’t react to, where accounts suggest with the low incubation period and very obvious symptoms, people almost universally reacted to 1918 flu sufferers. So perhaps what Barry said was some allusion to that, that perhaps confined in a small room, one case of Spanish flu would be more likely to beget more cases than the same scenario for covid.
Which of course turns it around to the absolute madness of what Trump is advocating. Now that we have learned as a population to react as a precaution to the coronavirus, he wants his citizens to stop.
Thanks for the Barry interview link. I am just starting into his book now.
My bad – I remembered it wrong. Barry said the 1918 flu was much much more lethal.
3:50 into the interview.
https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/2020/05/14/856008341/fresh-air-for-may-14-2020-what-the-1918-pandemic-can-tell-us-about-the-covid-19?showDate=2020-05-14