"Greatest Presidential Felony" in History

[_moksha]

"Greatest Felony!!! aaarrrrghhh" - but lets wait until we get a book on the retail shelves before we say anything.
Yep, "huge" certainly describes what you're peddling. rube.

I think Fox News talking heads would describe this as "Greatest Presidential Felonygate" if this was a Democrat who did this. They would be positively histrionic and you would be demanding his/her head.

[_subgenius]

"Greatest Felony!!! aaarrrrghhh" - but lets wait until we get a book on the retail shelves before we say anything.
Yep, "huge" certainly describes what you're peddling. rube.

I think Fox News talking heads would describe this as "Greatest Presidential Felonygate" if this was a Democrat who did this. They would be positively histrionic and you would be demanding his/her head.

So you're saying the Democrats are acting like Republicans?
Interesting tack, but I'm intrigued by the wind you're blowing.

[_Gunnar]

So you're saying the Democrats are acting like Republicans?
Interesting tack, but I'm intrigued by the wind you're blowing.

That's as silly as arguing that if Democrats justly accuse a Republican of committing a crime that Republicans would certainly have justly accused a Democrat of committing, they are to be dismissed as merely acting like Republicans. The sad thing is that Democrats, historically, have seemed inclined to meekly buy this type of argument whenever Republicans pushed back, because they didn't want to seem like the bad guys, or, at least, not as bad as Republicans.

[_moksha]

... because they didn't want to seem like the bad guys, or, at least, not as bad as Republicans.

Is that even possible?

[_Res Ipsa]

Here is one important effect of the failure in leadership at the national level. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/ ... me=DM38685

Since the very beginning of the pandemic, WHO has stressed over and over again that the countries that employ the basic public health strategies that we've known about and used for decades will allow countries to beat back the level of infection to the point where, instead of having to fight blazing wildfires, countries can focus on occasional flareups. Those strategies are:

1. Test every symptomatic person.
2. Isolate every infected person in medically supervised facilities.
3. Trace the contacts of every identified infected person.
4. Quarantine all close contacts of identified cases for two weeks in facilities away from healthy persons. Home quarantine is a less preferable alternative.

We know there are a non-trivial percentage of cases that never develop systems. For those, we again use the basics of physical distance and hand washing, with the addition of cloth face coverings as long as people continue to do the distancing and washing.

What this does is break chains of transmission by removing the people who are infected or likely to become infected from the general population.

You want to know why South Korea and other countries have been much more successful than the US -- it's not just masks. It's effective testing, isolation, contact tracing and quarantine.

Part of our problem here is relying on the telephone to talk to identified cases and to contacts. I just finished a two-month stint as a census enumerator. I knocked on doors of people that hadn't submitted their census information by mail, telephone or internet and interviewed them in person. If you want people to trust you with information, you need to talk with them face to face and establish even the slightest relationship of trust. The people that I had the most success with were people who were educated about what the census was, why we do the census, and the importance of being counted in the census. The people that I had the most trouble with were people who didn't know anything about the census.

It's too easy to ignore the phone or use called id to screen calls. So, contact tracers need to go in person.

We've also decided to use home quarantine. It's very difficult to protect the other members of the household, so to be effective, we'd need to quarantine the entire household for two weeks. But that requires support, both economic and logistical. It requires job protection for those required to quarantine. It requires financial support for those living paycheck to paycheck. And it requires people to run whatever errands are necessary for the people who are quarantined.

It also requires daily, in-person followup so that those quarantined know that compliance is being monitored and that someone is assigned to monitor the household's health and provide whatever support they need.

But most of all, it needs something else the WHO has pounded on on since day 1: national unity. Divisions in the nation are cracks that the virus exploits like crazy. It infects, sickens, and kills people when political division leads people to reject sound public health practices. People need to be educated on why isolating patients is important, why tracing contacts is important, and why quarantining is important. They need to understand that systems will be in place to take care of them and their families while they are separated from the general population. That can only be done through national leadership: in our case, that would be President Trump, Majority Leader McConnell, and Speaker Pelosi.

The Census Bureau just laid off an army of potential contact tracers who are trained to and experienced at knocking on strangers doors. The Census Bureau, in fact, has the knowledge and expertise to build a system of collecting data and keeping it confidential. We could start putting the systems in place that could help us avoid the massive flare ups that happen whenever we try to open things up.

But it takes national unity -- something we don't have and something our leaders don't see as important. So we go through the motions of contract tracing, but never see the real benefits it can have.