Wuhan Coronavirus: Megathread - Got too big

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Through the magic power of Corona-chan and 'systemic racism', the state of Oregon no longer has to abide by the Constitution.

www.wsj.com

Opinion | Oregon’s Segregated Covid Relief Fund Is Blatantly Unconstitutional

Maria Garcia applied for aid and was denied simply because she doesn’t ‘identify as Black.’
www.wsj.com www.wsj.com

Oregon’s Segregated Covid Relief Fund Is Blatantly Unconstitutional​


The state of Oregon, hoping to strike a blow against both the pandemic and “systemic racism,” has established a Covid relief fund exclusively for blacks and black-owned businesses. The Oregon Cares Fund website accurately describes the program as “unprecedented.” It is also surely unconstitutional.

In July the Oregon Legislature Emergency Board allotted $200 million to assist small businesses suffering losses because of the pandemic and government-ordered shutdowns. Of the total, $62 million was set aside for the Oregon Cares Fund, whose website describes it as “a Fund for Black people, Black-owned businesses, and Black community based organizations.” Black families are eligible for up to $3,000 and black-owned businesses for up to $100,000.

Maria Garcia, owner of the Revolucion Coffee House in Portland, applied for support. She was denied because her business “does not meet the criteria because 0% of its owners identify as Black.” She has sued in federal court, alleging that the denial violates her rights under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Last month a federal court declined a petition in another lawsuit, by the timber company Great Northern Resources, to enjoin further distributions from the Cares Fund. Both cases await a ruling on the constitutional merits.

Ms. Garcia is Mexican-American. The Portland-based Latino Network asserted that “the actions of Maria Garcia are anti-Black.”

The state couldn’t have been surprised at the challenges. Oregon’s Legislative Counsel advised the Emergency Board that, absent evidentiary findings of past discrimination by the state in the relevant industries, “the program would almost certainly be unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment.” But in a brief submitted to the Legislature, the Portland law firm Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt gave the board cover with this now familiar refrain: “Centuries of systemic and institutional discrimination—perpetuated and exacerbated by current systems—have caused economic disparities.”

After objecting that the Great Northern lawsuit is funded by an “out-of-state activist,” as if that had any relevance to its merits, Gov. Kate Brown and Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum offered the same defense as Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt in a joint statement attributing the harms suffered by black businesses “to long–standing systemic inequities.” The Emergency Board put it this way: “The Black community across Oregon is in the midst of two pandemics. The first is this country’s 400 years of racial violence and strategic divestment from the Black community, deepened here in Oregon through intentional policy and practice.”
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Heyyy Bubba said:
Chicago politician/restaurant owner defying Covid restrictions:http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2020/12/operating-in-plain-sight.html?m=1

I wonder how many speakeasy things are happening now. Sounds exciting.
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I know that's what happened with my barber when the first lockdown happened It's depressing I have to specify the first lockdown.. She just gave haircuts to people on her back porch and garage. I'm surprised it's taken this long for the media to notice, but that's probably a good thing.
 
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Stalphos Johnson said:
I know that's what happened with my barber when the first lockdown happened It's depressing I have to specify the first lockdown.. She just gave haircuts to people on her back porch and garage. I'm surprised it's taken this long for the media to notice, but that's probably a good thing.
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It's policy to destroy small business. It's a win win. Small business is a huge employer but they don't pay much in the way of bribes to politicians. Far better to re-organize the economy where large corporations like Amazon and the big box retailers dominate. The destruction of small business during lockdowns is a feature not a bug.

Elwood P. Dowd said:
Edit: The comment section to the below article is fucking terrifying. Makes this doctor look like a moderate. Wish I could figure a way to grab that.

It’s Time to Scare People About Covid
Our public messaging about the virus should explain the real costs — in graphic terms — of catching the virus.

Elisabeth Rosenthal
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
Dr. Rosenthal is a contributing Opinion writer.

Dec. 7, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET

294

Desiree Rios for The New York Times
I still remember exactly where I was sitting decades ago, during the short film shown in class: For a few painful minutes, we watched a woman talking mechanically, raspily through a hole in her throat, pausing occasionally to gasp for air.

The public service message: This is what can happen if you smoke.

I had nightmares about that ad, which today would most likely be tagged with a trigger warning or deemed unsuitable for children. But it was supremely effective: I never started smoking and doubt that few if any of my horrified classmates did either.

When the government required television and radio stations to give $75 million in free airtime for antismoking ads between 1967 and 1970 — many of them terrifyingly graphic — smoking rates plummeted. Since then, numerous smoking “scare” campaigns have proved successful. Some even featured celebrities, like Yul Brynner’s posthumous offering with a warning after he died from lung cancer: “Now that I’m gone, don’t smoke, whatever you do, just don’t smoke.”

As the United States faces out-of-control spikes from Covid-19, with people refusing to take recommended, often even mandated, precautions, our public health announcements from governments, medical groups and health care companies feel lame compared to the urgency of the moment. A mix of clever catchphrases, scientific information and calls to civic duty, they are virtuous and profoundly dull.

The Centers for Diseases Control urges people to wear masks in videos that feature scientists and doctors talking about wanting to send kids safely to school or protecting freedom.

Quest Diagnostics made a video featuring people washing their hands, talking on the phone, playing checkers. The message: “Come together by spending time apart.”

As cases were mounting in September, the Michigan government produced videos with the exhortation, “Spread Hope, Not Covid,” urging Michiganders to put on a mask “for your community and country.”

Forget that. Mister Rogers-type nice isn’t working in many parts of the country. It’s time to make people scared and uncomfortable. It’s time for some sharp, focused terrifying realism.

“Fear appeals can be very effective,” said Jay Van Bavel, associate professor of psychology at New York University, who co-authored a paper in Nature about how social science could support Covid response efforts. (They may not be needed as much in places like New York, he noted, where people experienced the constant sirens and the makeshift hospitals.)

I’m not talking fear-mongering, but showing in a straightforward and graphic way what can happen with the virus.

From what I could find, the state of California came close to showing the urgency: a soft-focus video of a person on a ventilator, featuring the sound of a breathing machine, but not a face. It exhorted people to wear a mask for their friends, moms and grandpas.

But maybe we need a P.S.A. featuring someone actually on a ventilator in the hospital. You might see that person “bucking the vent” — bodies naturally rebel against the machine forcing pressurized oxygen into the lungs, which is why patients are typically sedated.

(Because I had witnessed this suffering as a practicing doctor, I was always upfront about the trauma with loved ones of terminally ill patients when they were trying to decide whether to consent to a relative being put on a ventilator. It sounds as easy as hooking someone to an I.V. It’s not.)

Another message could feature a patient lying in an I.C.U. bed, immobile, tubes in the groin, with a mask delivering 100 percent oxygen over the mouth and nose — eyes wide with fear, watching the saturation numbers rise and dip on the monitor over the bed.

Maybe some P.S.A.s should feature a so-called Covid long hauler, the 5 percent to 10 percent of people for whom recovery takes months. Perhaps a professional athlete like the National Football League’s Ryquell Armstead, 24, who has been in and out of the hospital with serious lung issues and missed the season.

These P.S.A.s might sound harsh, but they might overcome our natural denial. “One consistent research finding is that even when people see and understand risks, they underestimate the risks to themselves,” Mr. Van Bavel said. Graphs, statistics and reasonable explanations don’t do it. They haven’t done it.

Only after Chris Christie, an adviser to President Trump, experienced Covid, did he start preaching about mask-wearing: “When you have seven days in isolation in an I.C.U. though, you have time to do a lot of thinking,” Mr. Christie said, suggesting that people, “follow C.D.C. guidelines in public no matter where you are and wear a mask to protect yourself and others.”

We hear from many who resist taking precautions. They say, “I know someone who had it and it’s not so bad.” Or, “It’s just like the flu.”

Sure, most longtime smokers don’t end up with lung cancer — or tethered to an oxygen tank — either. (That, in fact, was the justification of smokers like my father, whose two-pack-a-day habit contributed to his death at 47 of a heart attack.)

These new ads will seem hard to watch. “We live in a Pixar era,” Mr. Van Bavel reflected, with traditional fairy tales now stripped of their gore and violence.

But studies have shown that emotional ads featuring personal stories about the effects of smoking were the most effective at persuading folks to quit. And quitting smoking is much harder than social-distancing and mask-wearing.

Once a vaccine has proved successful and enough people are vaccinated, the pandemic may well be in the rearview mirror. In the meantime, the creators of public health messaging should stop favoring the cute, warm and dull. And — at least sometimes — scare you.

Elisabeth Rosenthal worked as an emergency room physician before becoming a journalist. A former New York Times correspondent, she is the author of “An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back” and the editor in chief of Kaiser Health News.
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When doom mongering Karens pipe up remind them that according to the WHO Covid has a mean mortality of 0.05% in the under 70's. If she argues accuse her of being a science denier.
 
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Standardized Profile said:
But it's not practically untested. Moderna, for one, has spent years working on a MERS-CoV mRNA vaccine. In 2020 they changed the focus to SARS-CoV-2, and started human trials (practical testing) in March. Over 15,000 people have received the vaccine, it works, and there are no serious side effects. Maybe some will appear when you scale up deployment to the millions, but I really doubt the public health cost will be greater than the cost of not vaccinating the population (e.g. about 237,000 excess deaths and almost 870,000 laboratory-confirmed hospitalizations so far, with masks and lockdowns). Unless the FDA reviewers find a misplaced decimal point, I think getting vaccinated is almost certainly safer than not. Maybe not for children, I don't think that's been studied yet, but among adults definitely.

To answer your question, human beings are terrible at judging risk, so they fall back on rules of thumb like "something new is dangerous" or "I can't trust people in authority." They will rely on these rules even if the status quo is more dangerous than the new thing, or the information provided by the authorities is verifiably correct (or at least close enough).[1] We rely on these rules of thumb, and then we assert control by taking or refusing to take some action based on the rules; this feels very reasonable and it's comforting to look back and imagine that we handled a dangerous situation appropriately.

[1] We saw this with the doomers, who insisted Corona-chan would kill us all and it was Donald Drumpf's fault; and we see it with the anti-vaxers, who insist Vax-chan will kill us all and it's Tony Fauci's fault.
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"They've been working on something similar for years" is not at all the same as actually passing robust clinical trials. There's a lot of shit people have been working on for years that I wouldn't trust my life to. Even the least scientifically-literate person can understand that you can't test for long-term side effects in a few months, even if every other aspect of the testing is perfect, which is a big if. We have clinical trials and strict regulations on vaccines for a reason. And dismissing all reasonable concerns about an obviously fast-tracked-to-hell vaccine as "anti-vax" just makes you look like a desperate retard.

t. someone who gets their flu vaccine every year
PurpleEater said:
There's more than you might think. Without powerleveling, I can confirm there are speakeasys of all kinds going on right now.
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I wish I were better at finding them tbh.
 
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The Skeptical Tomato X5 said:

Remember that future roadmap from Canada that leaked and was talking about a new disease that they were referring to as Covid-21? Well, this might be it.
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It's always either India or China whenever these sort of things start from. Those places are a goldmine for diseases for obvious reasons. If it was in somewhere else, it's worth paying attention. I bet they're now just reporting whatever diseases under the sun from those places because Wuflu is all the rage now. Remember that time months back where reporters treated China getting sick from rat poop as a new thing, but it has been a thing ever for years?
 
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PurpleEater said:
"You probably killed people"

Screen Shot 2020-12-06 at 3.35.41 PM.png
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Keep bugging me and I'll add you to the list, Karen
 
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Elwood P. Dowd said:
Maybe some P.S.A.s should feature a so-called Covid long hauler, the 5 percent to 10 percent of people for whom recovery takes months. Perhaps a professional athlete like the National Football League’s Ryquell Armstead, 24, who has been in and out of the hospital with serious lung issues and missed the season.
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[Citation Needed]

(not you, obviously. The Journoroach LARPing as a practicing physician).
Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal.
The very first sentence on her wikipedia page: "Elisabeth Rosenthal (born 29 April 1956, New York City)[1] is a non-practicing physician and former New York Times reporter who in recent years has focused on health and environment matters."

"Starting in 1997, she worked as the Beijing correspondent for six years.[2]"

"She then became the European health and environment correspondent, working out of the Times' office in Rome. In 2008 Rosenthal moved back to New York and became the paper's global environmental correspondent. In 2012 she began covering the Affordable Care Act, which started her new beat as a healthcare reporter.[2]"

(Archive)

>non-practicing
>Beijing correspondent
>Euro correspondant
>Obamacare stan

I swear to God, you can't make this up.
:stress:
 
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Ad Lib Moaning said:
It's always either India or China whenever these sort of things start from. Those places are a goldmine for diseases for obvious reasons. If it was in somewhere else, it's worth paying attention. I bet they're now just reporting whatever diseases under the sun from those places because Wuflu is all the rage now. Remember that time months back where reporters treated China getting sick from rat poop as a new thing, but it has been a thing ever for years?
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I had a Facebook friend that started freaking out about the few bubonic plague outbreaks that happened this year along a few hiking trails on the east coast. I once did a bullshit paper on the Black Death a thousand years ago back in high school and during my research I found that the bacteria that causes plagues has been in America since the early 20th century and we typically get a handful cases of bubonic every year, typically along various hiking trails.

So of course I made fun of her and told her she was shortening her life over something that happens every year and is treatable with antibiotics.
 
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Bakarina said:
I had a Facebook friend that started freaking out about the few bubonic plague outbreaks that happened this year along a few hiking trails on the east coast. I once did a bullshit paper on the Black Death a thousand years ago back in high school and during my research I found that the bacteria that causes plagues has been in America since the early 20th century and we typically get a handful cases of bubonic every year, typically along various hiking trails.

So of course I made fun of her and told her she was shortening her life over something that happens every year and is treatable with antibiotics.
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Yeah though TBF its still like a 5-10% mortality rate even with antibiotics.

I would take COVID untreated over the bubonic plague even with treatment any day of the week.
 
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Return of the Freaker said:
Keep bugging me and I'll add you to the list, Karen
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That lady sounds likes she's going to get rickets.

We make fun of mask karens, but here's a post from Reddit Lockdown skeptics that's retarded the completely other way:

Nope. I lost my job because of a pandemic. How could they have paid me and the others they laid off? The entire company would collapse and then there'd be way more unemployed.

I agreed to do X for $Y. They could no longer pay me $Y, so I no longer do X for them.

I Door Dashed 10 hours per day, 7 days a week (even with 3 small children at home) until I got another job.

I'm fortunate to have tried real hard in life and got a great degree from a great college and have a career with extremely low unemployment (programmer), but I made over a thousand dollars per week easy doing something anyone can do.

I have less than zero sympathy for an able bodied adult being unemployed for 8 months. There is something wrong. Either an inability to work, or a lack of effort to find work. The first deserves sympathy. The second deserves scorn.
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Reminds me of the PULL YOURSELF UP BY YOUR BOOT STRAPS! posts that would rile goons up.

What kind of re-re turns down compensation you're legally entitled to in favor of doing bullshit gig economy stuff? If he were a so-called programmer he should have been making a full UI payout plus expanded benefits in the summer to get paid almost the same as if you were working for the soyboy delivery service.
 
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Elwood P. Dowd said:
Edit: The comment section to the below article is fucking terrifying. Makes this doctor look like a moderate. Wish I could figure a way to grab that.
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You can archive the raw JSON the page requests when you load the comments.


That's the first ten, I think. There'll be some additional cursor or pagination on the query to get more.
 
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PurpleEater said:
There's more than you might think. Without powerleveling, I can confirm there are speakeasys of all kinds going on right now.
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Oh, hell, yes. I get my hair cut at a neighbor's house, been doing that for months now. Neighbor hairdresser who is out of work. No need to go on base, get in line. Just show up, sit in the dining room, get it done. Not going back to the base barber shop.

Got some new masks today. They say, "This mask is as useless as our governor." Funny, nobody says anything negative about my various masks. Guess they already know I don't give a fuck what they think or say.



Added: Well, they weren't treating people like prisoners at Costco today, so I went shopping. No fucking cherries. Shit! Saw some blueberries from Peru, which were damned good last year. Got a couple of packages, some croissants. Body wash for the wife was still on sale, so I scored a three-pack. Irish butter was still on sale, got a three-pack and put it in the freezer to go with the package purchased last week. For some reason am thinking about preparing a baked potato or maybe baking some brownies, or both.

Here's the latest from the county I live in.



BREAKING NEWS FROM THE CARMEL PINE CONE

December 7, 2020, 2:21 p.m.


ICU PICTURE IMPROVES AGAIN AS MORENO STAYS MUM

There has been no announcement so far today from county health officer Dr. Ed Moreno as to any decision he may have made about imposing Gov. Gavin Newsom's new shutdown rules on the county. Meanwhile, the California Department of Public Health said this morning that ICU availability in the Greater Bay Area region, of which Monterey County is a part, improved today to 25.7 percent of capacity — a significant increase from yesterday's 24.1 percent.

Newsom announced last week any region that fell below 15 percent ICU capacity would have to follow the new shutdown regimen, but Moreno indicated Friday he may not wait that long to impose the rules here, and with the Christmas shopping season in full swing, many businesses and their employees are on pins and needles about what their future holds. Moreno has said nothing about the criteria he may use to make the decision.

While ICU availability improved throughout the Greater Bay Area, here in Monterey County the picture improved as well, the state health department said. The latest numbers show that 19 people are in ICU in Monterey County, down 5 from yesterday, and the number of available ICU beds improved from 20 to 23.

Unfortunately, those improvements aren't reflected in the current data for cases. Today, the county health department said 253 new cases of coronavirus infection have been detected among county residents, including 171 in Salinas and the Salinas Valley and 44 in the Monterey Peninsula: 26 in Seaside, nine in Marina, six in Monterey, one each in Pebble Beach and Carmel area (93923) and none in Big Sur, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Carmel Valley or Pacific Grove. Please keep in mind that these are daily numbers.

The surge in new cases pushed Monterey County's 7-day average of new cases per day per 100,000 residents to 44.2, which is a record. It also pushed the number of coronavirus-positive inpatients at the county's hospitals to 97, up from 87 yesterday (ICU patients included).

To see the most up-to-date charts and tables from the county health department, click here. Below, you can also find the updated versions of our charts showing coronavirus infections countywide and in the Monterey Peninsula, along with the data for hospitalizations and our chart breaking down Monterey County's coronavirus cases and infection rates by zip code. Please check these charts and tables for the latest data on coronavirus cases in your community.

I like this one:

1607377601518.png
 
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