Scizor wrote

Lia wrote

Scizor wrote Yesterday I thought it was insane that Italy averaged a death every 4 minutes, today with their new numbers they're averaging one every 2 minutes and 30ish seconds, and it's most likely even higher due to undiagnosed deaths. Will most likely see country death tolls in the 1000's per day within a week or so.

A lot of people in the US don't seem to be taking it as seriously as they should. I think health organizations dropped the ball by saying that Young people will most likely be fine, because it gave people the whole "It's just the flu calm down" mentality. Exponential problems aren't a problem until they are.

I don't think it's just the US that didn't take it very seriously, i think the whole world didn't take it as serious.

It's just a shame that countries like the US can spend half there money on military and yet allow things like this happen.

Bill Gates said it himself.

Good point, I said US just because it's where I'm from so I see our response more closely than other countries. Outside of China and Italy we haven't really seen a massive full scale response. Germany and France are certainly in dire trouble as well, and will probably be at Italy's stages within a week.

There a lot of "What are you gonna do, have the military shoot the virus??" memes ever since Joe Biden said during the last presidential debate that he would mobilize the military for this. I think he made a good point though, we have something like 450k people in the National Guard, they should be used to mobilize emergency hospitals and supply depots. We (US) don't have enough critical care beds and facilities to handle what we're likely soon to experience, might as well use the people we're already paying to try and mitigate things.

There's really no reason for the richest country in the world to have such a weak response or claim to be unable to handle large scale supply shortages, I think the silver lining of this whole situation is that it's exposing gaping holes in the US' healthcare system and economic inequality. Universal Healthcare or at a minimum universal subsidized healthcare and UBI will most likely be front and center in every political election going forward. Even Republicans are supporting a UBI relief effort at this point.