turning it into a political tool. He is using death to increase his power.

In the end you can only save yourself.

Avoid people.

We aren't just going to have a second wave in this country, we are going to have a third and fourth as well, of that I have become convinced.

This society has way too many assholes who think their constitutional rights are somehow being violated if they are asked to kindly keep their lung droplets to themselves!

Hell, they threatened grocery workers with physical violence for wearing masks!

There are too many fucking whackjobs in this country and anyone that thinks this will be over soon is fooling themselves. Those assholes will continue to make this worse.

Some of us can avoid people. Others have to still be at risk every day.

It is almost as if Georgia has decided to test the political VS. medical argument, and is wagering the lives of the citizens in the process. I think that the Ga. leadership know that they are going to kill a lot of Georgians, they just believe that the benefits outweigh the costs. In a Republican equation where health and safety is balanced against profits, the profits will always tip the scale.

I live very near the Fl./Ga. line in Florida. I have many friends and associates in South Georgia. The people I am in contact with are not going to play by the new "open up" rules. Like smart people everywhere, they are waiting for the medical situation to change before their behaviors do. This flu is still as deadly as it was three weeks ago, and will still be as deadly three weeks from now.

the mental capacity to understand the value of human lives. They see us as less worthy than them. They view us through the eyes of a slave owner. We serve a function that is useful to them, but we are expendable. It really doesn't matter if we die.

It is really sad to watch these "Live Free or Die" choose death. It isn't just death for them but for their families, their children and potentially other families. I really do have to question the intelligence of people right now.

everyone. Not just their family and friends, everyone.

We are at a conflict between individual rights and collective rights, and the old adage that your rights end at my nose applies. You do not have a right to put other people in danger. This really isn’t debatable.

The stay at home orders probably are unconstitutional. They're the right idea, but they probably violate the first amendment. General collective benefit vs specifically enumerated right to assembly. Doubly so since many are done by governor executive order and not by explicit legislative action.

They do not have the right to threaten others though,no matter the constitutionality of the mask requirements and shutdown orders. Need to be arrests of those taking lawful protest was too far, and especially those threatening shop workers.

change is either a hoax or overblown and Obama was one of the worst things to happen to America. They can only see the world through a lens of prejudice, rather than accept the facts.

Or delusions.

While I don't want to sound cavalier, that seems like a reasonable guess.

The 1918 flu epidemic took over 600,000 Americans. That's out of a population of about 105 million. Of course, back then there wasn't as good an understanding of how illness spread. More importantly not that many people had running water in their homes, which means hand-washing (the very best public health measure ever) wasn't very possible for a lot of people.

Now, despite the idiots, we do understand reasonably well how this is spread. Almost everyone has access to soap and water. Of course, we also have a lot of people who don't get how serious this is, or who actually think that a few deaths are worth it to "reopen the economy". Especially if old people die. Because, you know, Medicare and Social Security. Clearly none of them ever had a mom who lived to be on Social Security and Medicare.

Even with the best of wills, even with the best of lockdowns, even with a Manhattan-project style push to develop a vaccine, this is not going to be over very soon. Even if the virus actually pulls back in hotter weather (which doesn't seem to be very likely), the stark truth is that no one who hasn't already had it is immune. Doubt has been expressed as to whether getting it and recovering confers immunity of any kind, let alone permanent immunity. That right now is an open question.

But let's say getting it and recovering does give permanent immunity. Hooray! But because it's a novel virus, I've read that we'd need to have 90% of the population get that immunity to achieve "herd immunity". Herd immunity, whatever the disease, is a good thing. But there is going to be a huge price to pay if that's the only way we get out of this, if no effective vaccine is produced within the next few years. People who seem to know this stuff say 18 months, maybe 2 years. It for some reason, such as this mutates horribly and effectively, it could be a whole lot longer.

However this plays out, it's going to be a very different world down the line.

Personal note. A year or two ago I decided I'd be on the National Mall for July 4, 2026. I was there fifty years earlier, July 4, 1976. My plan was to totally enjoy our 250th birthday and tell every single person I'd meet that I was there fifty years earlier. I also intend to drag my son along, so he can roll his eyes as I do that. And then, since he stands a good chance of being around on July 4, 2076, (He'll only be 93) I expect him to be on the Mall on that date and tell every single person he meets that he was there fifty years earlier, and his mom was there one hundred years earlier. So here's the thing. What I pictured for July 4, 2026 even five months ago is quite different from how it's going to really be. I'm not about to make predictions as to just what those differences will be, but I still hope I can be there in six years.

The impetus for my 2026 plans is a series of novels (Directive 51, Daybreak Zero, and The Last President) by John Barnes. In 2024 eco-terrorists essentially destroy civilization. It's a great series, and at the end it's July 4, 2026. Even though things are horrible and terribly different, it inspired me to plan on being on the National Mall on that date. As bad as things might be, I feel pretty confident that they won't be as bad as in those novels.

books you mentioned, but that is great material for a novel. By the way things are going, I fear the world will be in a much worse state for the meeting in 2076.

I fear that when we have days with getting on for 10,000 people dying, we will be back to a lockdown, with civil unrest and a depression. All avoidable, if we weren't led by imbeciles.

Red states like GA are going to keep the epidemic going.

States up north may need to seal their borders to tamp down the 2nd wave.

the bodies pile up in the many thousands a day and Trump turns any opposition into an attack on freedom.

We lost 600,000 to AIDS in the 80s and 90s, and that wasn't transmitted anywhere as easily. That's more than the number of US soldiers killed in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam combined - and that's a disease that was spread only by intimate bodily fluids like semen, saliva, and blood.

for ANYONE to be out and about when this threat is still live.

low given the lack of control over the spread, we are going to be in the hundreds of thousands by election day. Is a candidate going to win who says he will shut down the economy again? I don't know.

The one hope is that one of the vaccines will prove to be very effective and safe in early human trials and will be released sometime this summer, with all vaccine manufacturers ramping up to produce massive quantities of it. I know that's not the usual method, but I suspect things will be hurried up as quickly as possible, once one of the potential vaccines proves effective and safe in early trials.

Then, perhaps, we'll be able to do a massive vaccination program in the Fall of 2020. It can be done if there is the will to do it and funding for it. Meanwhile, antivirals are being tested individually and in combinations everywhere in the industrialized world. We're not seeing the reports, except for remdesivir, but there are other trials going on. If one of them or a combination proves to be useful in tests on people early in the disease, then that treatment will become the standard very quickly, and production can be ramped up by having multiple manufacturers producing the same meds.

There will be resistance to this from pharmaceutical companies, but that can be dealt with in most countries.

Still, I expect there to be death numbers in the mid six figures by the end of a year in this round of the pandemic.

Not good. Not good at all.

Welcome to DU, NoRoadUntravelled.

My first response is because he blew it, he knows it, and the testing results would make it painfully obvious that he has, once again, been an EPIC FAILURE in responding to this crisis. He is KILLING people.

But I ALSO think that he was looking for something to use to make sure he got re-elected. He wanted to, in his own small, warped mind, be our SAVIOR, just like he said during the campaign... only HE could fix this country. Of course it was just a con's line to pander to the sheeple, but it worked on them.

He has now blown the pandemic crisis option.

He also wanted to flout the RED HOT ECONOMY that only helped the rich and Wall Street, but not we little people. THAT has now been shot.

Vlad is now telling him (I think) that he is now beyond HIS help. Pootie Poot can't change enough votes to plausibly get him elected.

Now, as his last resort, he may try to use the pandemic crisis to cancel the election. Many here say that is not possible, yet they have continually made the impossible, possible. Over and over again.

We'll see.

Once everyone gets tested and we find that 50% (conservative guess) of Americans have been infected, and when they start totaling up the deaths actually due to COVID-19, and 1,000,000 people will have died (after the 2nd, 3rd, 4th waves), the shit is going to hit the fan and DRENCH the turd in his own shit. His place in history will reflect that. They will have to dig a hole in the gutter for him to have a place in our history.

But that is just my prediction. YMMV.

Your prediction makes a lot of sense. The idea of 1,000,000 deaths is distressing but based on his actions and the actions of his followers storming capitol buildings and refusing to comply with safety measures like masks and distancing, and the early opening of states while numbers are still climbing makes it a real possibility.

We’re still in the first wave and I suspect it’s just going to get bigger and bigger.