I personally have tuned out all the news since the beginning. Yes, I may read a story from an outlet but unless it has verifiable data or quotes a non-anonymous expert in context, the article is worthless. Just about every article misrepresents the data at hand or doesn’t provide the full context. Just yesterday an article about the SK study claimed that the study says it is “impossible to get reinfected”. Ummm no, the study showed that people weren’t reinfected within a few months, not that people have lifetime immunity.
Regarding politics - despite my political views, I never believed that anything to do with Corona should become a political conversation in either direction. I don’t care if it politically correct to close the border with China, Europe, or anyone. I don’t care that closing the economy will make Trump look bad. I don’t care if Trump is blamed or if Cuomo is celebrated or if the 2020 election is affected because there are things way more important to worry about and makes an election look very unimportant relatively.
Why all of a sudden the politics is not important when most other issues are easy to identify where I stand based on my politics? Because corona is a new, poorly understood virus, and that has nothing to do with politics. This is the chance for everyone to allow the data to form their views on a truly new issue, instead of trying to bend pre-existing political slants to inform ourselves. Lives are at stake, it isn’t the right time to play politics so I can make Trump look good or Cuomo look bad or vice versa.
When it comes to other issues such as abortion etc, we all already have our views, and we naturally like to listen to the people that fight for those views. And in the grand scheme of things it’s all child play compared to corona.
I tend to think that the administration took way too long to react and close the economy, but now it’s swinging in the other direction and taking way too long to start reopening things. I do agree with Murphy‘s statement that public health is economic health as a general rule, but you can’t use politics to inform you of when it’s publicly healthy to reopen. I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to reopen a lot of businesses. Now that everyone has access to masks, require (not just suggest) that people wear masks, make some other rules and you can reopen many more businesses. It shouldn’t take forever to start the reopening process. The reopening process is not black and white. No one should be saying that we should be fully locked down or fully opened up. The only way to do it is in stages, and even so, there’s no end in sight for the last stages, at this point. But we should do as we always should have done - follow what’s working in other countries, at least whatever you can. China reopened with masks (but slowly), South Korea never closed, but required masks and had significant contact tracing. As long as masks were not available, we couldn’t reopen. But now that they are plenty, and the numbers are decreasing, start reopening.
