[chrisjs96]

Yea just keep imagining. We'll never know. We could have had the same amount of deaths just by the older folks and at risk people quarantine themselves and everyone else keeps working. Then we could have had the jobs and money to help our neighbors pay for grocery delivery. People helping other people. Quarantining everyone is like punishing the whole class when one kid acts up. Now no one has jobs and we can't help each other. From what I know the older members of my family were already taking precautions. Why does everyone? If they are in contact with no one then we can't spread it to them.

[ethanbond]

Man, if only there were some sort of organization that we could create and give immense power, capital, and reach to organize such efforts...

[chrisjs96]

You're a developer I'm assuming. You think the CDC is capable of developing a model that could predict this? As a developer I don't have much confidence for something like that. Netflix still can't recommend me a movie correctly with millions upon million data points and spending millions of dollars on it.

[ethanbond]

No, I'm not a developer, and no, the CDC is not the organization that I'm alluding to, nor am I poking at the need for any sort of model. The need is for our nation's resources - at every level - to be organized and deployed effectively against this problem using the information available at any given moment. We have failed at this at nearly every level, at nearly every moment.

A good example is my mother who is a teacher. School started this week, and they've been changing their local guidelines/procedures until, well, they continue to change every day still. It should be no surprise, because these are a bunch of county-level educational administrators trying to figure out how to respond to a once-in-a-century epidemiological/social/economic event with effectively zero guidance. It's improv but with people's lives at stake.

Why hasn't the federal government, with the immense resources and power that we entrust to it, stepped up and provided clear guidelines for opening schools and the funding necessary to implement those guidelines? If the answer is that it cannot be safe to open schools, then why have they not stepped up to provide clear guidelines for moving classes online and the funding necessary to implement those guidelines?

This is well beyond the point of being an enormous national security threat. Our government has both legal and moral authority to organize our society. This doesn't mean martial law or nationalization - simply publishing good, clear guidelines for every type of establishment and making available the funding necessary to implement those guidelines. Those guidelines ought to include clear risk assessments that these establishments and their patrons can evaluate for themselves to gauge their level of risk acceptance for re-opening, re-closing, patronizing, or choosing to stay away from.

Instead we have an entire executive branch hellbent on retaining its power, regardless of how sick, destitute, and morally broken its kingdom winds up becoming in the process. It's equal parts pathetic and despicable. Vote.