A Year in Solitary

I noted in the update that Mango Mussolini had suddenly been converted from a COVID Truther to a babbling imitation of a "war president" and I wondered what the hell? This joker notoriously never changes the brain cell he calls his mind; he's stuck where he was in the Eighties.

Well, apparently, here's what happened; he read (or, let's not kid ourselves, was probably read-to and given a colorful comic-strip summary of) a study done in London modeling epidemiological responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the likely outcomes. The "no-action" response - i.e. treat this as a seasonal flu and let it run it's course, essentially the Trumpkins' "plan"?

2.2 million dead just from the disease. And that's without the deaths that will happen because the ICUs are jammed with people in respiratory failure from the disease.

But.

"Suppression" - completely banning all public gatherings, closing shops, workplaces, restaurants, basically making people inmates in their homes...apparently works.

Here's the nut grafs if you don't want to read the whole thing:

"Suppression works! The death rate in the US peaks 3 weeks from now at a few thousand deaths, then goes down. We hit but don't exceed the number of available ventilators. The nightmarish death tolls from the rest of the study disappear. But here's the catch: if we EVER relax suppression before a vaccine is administered to the entire population, COVID-19 comes right back and kills millions of Americans in a few months, the same as before. After the 1st suppression period ends in July, we could probably lift restrictions for a month, followed by 2 more months of suppression, in a repeating pattern without triggering an outbreak or overwhelming the ventilator supply. Staggering breaks by city could do a bit better. But we simply cannot EVER allow the virus to spread throughout the entire population in the way other viruses do, because it is just too deadly. If lots of people we know end up getting COVID-19, it means millions of Americans are dying. It simply can't be allowed to happen."

When do the authors believe a vaccine is likely?

Eighteen months.

So for the next year and a half we will be unable to work, many of us. Theaters, restaurants, bookstores...won't be able to open. How will we live? We will still have landlords demanding rent and banks demanding mortgage payments. We will still have to buy food, pay bills.

As I was saying earlier; the ONLY way I see we will get through this without breaking our society in too many ways to anticipate is for government to, in effect, pay for society to go on for a year and a half while we're all in solitary. Pay wages, pay rent and mortgages, pay shop owners and businesses that can't open.

The alternative?

We emerge from this with a huge mass of impoverished "citizens" ruled by a tiny minority of the obscenely rich who were able to ride this out in luxury.

The problem?

For the GOP that's a feature, not a bug.

Well...shit.

WASF.