Encouragement Thread - If you need support let’s help

[Brian Tuma]

7 hours ago, N.E. Brigand said:

I was saving that bit of good news for today, having already posted five encouraging news items yesterday. Maybe subconsciously I was leaving it for you, as the originator of this thread and someone who's mentioned that drug in the past, to mention here.

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Apparently I should also be feeling encouraged that I live in the U.S. rather than Sweden, where they took a looser approach to locking things down than many states did here, and they now are suffering in terms of total fatalities (2,462 as of yesterday), at least in comparison to their Scandinavian neighbors (Norway: 207; Denmark: 443 -- Finland: 206). Sweden is about twice as large as each of those others, so they probably ought to have a death toll of 1,000 or less.

Have there ever been any Swedish drum corps?

Is there a good list of all the countries known to have had a drum corps?

Strängnäs from Sweden toured the states three or four times. 

[skevinp]

4 hours ago, N.E. Brigand said:

I vaguely remember when one of the jet teams flew here, there was a picture in the newspaper that showed the planes pretty close to some skyscrapers --probably just a matter of image perspective-- which led to some tough questions for the air show about safety.

When I worked on the 64th floor in Seattle and the blue angels were doing an air show in the area, they did a drill where they split out in 5 different directions.  One of them headed for downtown and flew between my building and the one across the street.  

It was just a few floors lower than me.  I could see the pilot really well.  

[N.E. Brigand]

Just now, Brian Tuma said:

Strängnäs from Sweden toured the states three or four times. 

Thank you! And here they are:

Although they're too small to appear in DCI nowadays, given the minimum membership rule.

[N.E. Brigand]

2 minutes ago, skevinp said:

When I worked on the 64th floor in Seattle and the blue angels were doing an air show in the area, they did a drill where they split out in 5 different directions.  One of them headed for downtown and flew between my building and the one across the street.  

It was just a few floors lower than me.  I could see the pilot really well.  

[Ghost]

34 minutes ago, JimF-LowBari said:

 edit: just read about the protest in MI. Most not wearing masks and not using social distancing. Darwin must be smiling....

And they're allowed to drive, drink, and vote.

[JimF-LowBari]

6 minutes ago, skevinp said:

When I worked on the 64th floor in Seattle and the blue angels were doing an air show in the area, they did a drill where they split out in 5 different directions.  One of them headed for downtown and flew between my building and the one across the street.  

It was just a few floors lower than me.  I could see the pilot really well.  

Like landing in San Diego. You look straight across from the plane and see people on the porch of their high rise.

San Diego’s airport was built in the 20s when there wasn’t much of a city. As the city expanded it grew around the airport. Rental car place we used was at the start of the landing strip. “I need to return the” ROAR “car and I need” ROAR “a detailed receipt” ROAR for my job”

[JimF-LowBari]

Just now, Ghost said:

And they're allowed to drive, drink, and vote.

Funny thing is we have laws regarding those things because there are idiots who abuse them. But come up with rules because there are people too stupid or stubborn to wear masks or follow other safety measures and suddenly the Gestapo is running things.

[N.E. Brigand]

9 minutes ago, HockeyDad said:

To be clear - I’m not defending them. BUT at the same time, it’s kind of scary how quickly we all gave up our liberties. At some point, “consent of the governed” will become a dominating factor. You cannot run people out of business. The goal was to flatten the curve so as to not overwhelm the hospitals. It was not to drive cases to zero. Let’s keep sight of that. If the curve has been successfully flattened, it’s time to start the opening up process. Perhaps on a voluntary basis. So old coots like me can stay hidden away if desired. 

It would be so awesome if we could drive the cases down to zero. That's what they've done in South Korea. Both that country and ours reported their first COVID-19 cases on the same day in January. They've had fewer than 400 deaths. We've had somewhat more. Yesterday in South Korea, there were just four new cases reported in the whole country -- and every one of them was at the airport: the cases were all people flying into that country from elsewhere. Imagine if we could get to the same place! (There will continue to be minor flare-ups in South Korea and everywhere else until a vaccine is available. No system is perfect.) But they got a huge jump on us in terms of testing, tracing, and isolating--something we've barely begun. One good thing is that we finally surpassed South Korea in terms of per capita testing about a week ago (although others now are far ahead of both countries in that regard), but because the disease has become so widespread here, we'll actually need to increase our current testing probably six times or more from current levels to have a chance of getting to a place where we can actually contain this thing. Our social distancing shut-downs were not intended only to relieve hospital capacity but also to buy us the time to build our testing capacity.

But we can do it. I believe in us.

Cixelsyd made what I think is a partially valid point in a previous discussion: even without the stay-at-home directives put in place by many states, a lot of the public would eventually have done the right thing and begun social distancing of their own volition. Here (source) is a graph showing restaurant reservations in the days leading up to states' closing down dine-in service:

I say "partially valid" because, in my opinion, without official restrictions in place, there wouldn't be enough voluntary social distancing -- and people would have delayed the start of their distancing even longer. And when a virus is spreading quickly, every day makes a huge difference. If the restrictions started just one week earlier, think how many of the 60,000+ Americans who have died in the past six weeks (even by this official count, which may be under-reporting the real death toll by 50% or more, that's more than died fighting over ten years in Vietnam) would still be with us. Nonetheless, once people started to grasp the dangers, they took action.

Another key implication of this chart is that as local governments start relaxing their stay-at-home orders, the public is going to be pretty slow to return until they feel safe. The economy won't rebound while people remain scared of dying.

But this is the key point: people aren't "giving up their liberties". They needed a nudge, but they're doing the right thing: sacrificing to protect the nation as a whole. (Once a majority of the public decides they've done enough, and that's it's safe to return to normal, no amount of government orders will stop them from going out again.)

And that's noble. It's very encouraging. Cheers to us!

[JimF-LowBari]

I kept hearing we have done more testing than South Korea but didn’t realize we are ahead in per capita testing. To me that per capita is the crux as we have about 6X the population 

[JimF-LowBari]

7 hours ago, JimF-LowBari said:

Good news in PA is guv is willing to start opening things up by county in about 2 weeks. Plan is if a county has less than 50 cases per 100k population over past 2 weeks they can be considered for reopening. Bad new for my area is 2 counties out of 10 currently qualify. Numbers are 45 up to 200+ (my sisters county). 

Interesting what affects the numbers and what needs to be done to help the situation. Just saw report on meat plant on eastern shore of MD getting hit because employees work, ride and in some cases live together in close quarters. Texting sis and one big reason her county is way up is because of a meat plant where workers are under the same conditions. Both plants still operating. 
 

Encouragement is that spotlighting things might help improve conditions....

Edited April 30, 2020 by JimF-LowBari