Based upon my conversations with family and acquaintances, I think we'll screw it up just as bad next time.

We're good at repeating history in this country. Not sure why it's taught in schools any more as no one pays attention or learns from past mistakes.

We deserve our own destruction.

Plane Coffee

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/u...gtype=Homepage
The graduating cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point have lived in Covid-19 quarantine for the past two weeks, confined to their dorms, wearing masks and watching Zoom conferences on leadership as they wait for President Trump to speak at their commencement on Saturday.

Sent home in March because of the coronavirus, around 1,100 newly minted Army second lieutenants were ordered back to campus after the president abruptly announced in mid-April that he wanted to go through with his previously planned commencement address. The speech now comes during a breakdown in relations between the president and the nation’s top military leaders, who have vehemently objected to Mr. Trump’s threats to use active-duty troops across the country to quell largely peaceful protests against police brutality.

In preparation for the president, the West Point cadets have been divided into four groups of about 250, with strict orders not to mingle outside their cohort. They eat in shifts in the dining hall, with food placed on long tables by kitchen staff who quickly leave. There are four designated paths for cadets who want to go for socially distanced runs.

To ensure an infection-free graduation ceremony, the cadets were tested for the virus when they arrived back on campus. Fifteen of them initially tested positive but showed no symptoms, said Lt. Col. Christopher Ophardt, a West Point spokesman. The 15 did not transmit the virus to others and are now virus-free, Colonel Ophardt said, and will graduate with the others in their class.



The ceremony, streamlined from previous years, will include no friends or family and is to be held on the main parade ground on campus, called the Plain, around 10 a.m. Cadets will be required to wear masks as they march in and take their seats, spaced about six feet apart. Once seated, they will be allowed to unmask. Mr. Trump, who has never worn a mask in public, is to speak at 11 a.m.

The campus will be closed to outsiders at 6 a.m. Protests against the president are expected in the nearby community.

The cheering cadets in full military dress will serve as a backdrop for a re-election campaign in which Mr. Trump, who is faltering in the polls, seeks to project strength as commander in chief. The president is certain to mention that he has increased funding for the military, but he is not likely to mention his disputes with the defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

General Milley apologized this week and considered resigning for his part in a photo opportunity with Mr. Trump after the authorities used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse peaceful protesters near a church by the White House.

Mr. Esper has publicly rejected the president’s threats to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to use active-duty troops to quell racial violence. In an extraordinary rebuke, Jim Mattis, the president’s first defense secretary, who resigned in protest in 2018, condemned the president’s leadership.

“Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens — much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander in chief, with military leadership standing alongside,” Mr. Mattis, a retired Marine four-star general, wrote after the church episode.

Mr. Trump has long revered West Point, which is six miles from his high school alma mater, the New York Military Academy, a 131-year institution that was sold at a bankruptcy auction in 2015 to a nonprofit controlled by Chinese investors.

“I’m doing it at West Point, which I look forward to,” the president said in April as he declared his commencement intentions — to the surprise of everyone, including the commanding officers at West Point. “I understand they’ll have distancing. They’ll have some big distance, and so it’ll be very different than it ever looked.”

Saturday’s commencement will be the first since 1977 that will not be held in Michie Stadium, the West Point football stadium, which does not have enough room on the field for keeping 1,107 cadets six feet apart.

The coronavirus has killed more than 114,000 Americans, and cases are increasing in a number of states as businesses reopen, although infections are sharply down in New York. Protests over the killing of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis are continuing across the country, and Mr. Trump is stoking a cultural divide with his Twitter feed.

Army officials said privately this week that they were nervous about what the president might say after two weeks of racial tension that has roiled the country. Mr. Trump could wade further into the fierce debate over whether to strip military bases of Confederate names, as a Republican-led Senate panel demanded on Thursday. Or he could make a surprise announcement about withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, they said.

Concern about the issue of police abuse have rippled through the campus in recent days. The West Point superintendent, Lt. Gen. Darryl A. Williams, convened the entire senior class on the parade ground where commencement will take place to hear their concerns and talk about his own experiences as a black man in the Army.

General Williams elaborated on those views in a letter to West Point alumni, faculty and cadets last week, saying that “during these unsettling times, I want us to recommit to eradicating racism from within our ranks by treating all people with dignity and respect.”

Zzzzzzzzzz

Are you concerned that the lockdown and travel bans artificially prevented the virus from burning through the rest of the country, so if everyone just went back to life as normal (no masks, no spacing, no quarantines, etc) the virus would pick up where it left off, or do you think the virus has pretty much reached all the corners of the US, has mutated itself to be less dangerous, and has generally burned most of its fuel by this point? This is in no way meant to be sarcastic, I'm genuinely curious.

So 15 tested positive, no symptoms, recovered, no spreading... yeah real dangerous virus...

People dieing from a cause and having Covid19 is a lot different than people dieing from Covid19...

People die as a direct result of Ebola, there is little doubt about. Bleeding orifices, melting organs..

Covid 19... very questionable death certificates

Point is about all the hoops required to get no closer than 10’ from POTUS. If it’s just the flu then why?

I heard in the news yesterday that some hospitals are back to 85%+ ICU capacity due to COVID AND normal ICU admissions. Resurgence was always likely when R was barely below 1 and in some cases, still above 1 when things started reopening.

As for the people saying 110,000 dead Americans is nothing because X number die of other causes are missing the point. It’s only 110,000 because we got R down by shutting down. Also, thanks for pointing out total excess deaths as yet another measure of why we are undercounting COVID deaths.

Maybe we can learn new tailored shutdown techniques, a more nuanced approach, but I doubt we’ll see any leadership from the top on that. Luckily some states have solid leadership.

Let me guess... Minnesota and Washington...

Alabama and Arizona I believe

Dealing individually with the various parts of your run-on sentence:

1. Are you concerned that the lockdown and travel bans artificially prevented the virus from burning through the rest of the country:
I am concerned about what in some cases was the near total suspension of civil rights for a lockdown that is virtually unprecedented in the history of public health and preventive medicine. Historically, the infected were quarantined, not the uninflected. And this may be the first time in history infected and contagious people were DIRECTED BY THE GOVERNMENT to be placed in nursing homes with the population most at risk with catastrophic results.
Even were I to concede that such a lockdown might be necessary (and I do not) I am also concerned that it was done in scientifically. Let me give an example.
The state of New York was subjected to statewide restrictions. The state of New York includes New York City which has an average population density of 27,000 people per square mile ( Manhattan having 67,000 people per square mile) while upstate NY has about 780 people per square mile and the entire state including rural areas only has about 421 people per square mile. Whether you believe the lockdown was appropriate or not, a one size fits all lockdown order was ridiculous. Yes, the constitution is not an invitation to suicide, but when constitutional rights are limited by a state government they should be limited to the least extent possible and clearly, any lockdown necessary for NYC was overkill for the rest of the state. By no stretch if the imagination does what happened even comport with science, civil rights aside.

2. so if everyone just went back to life as normal (no masks, no spacing, no quarantines, etc) the virus would pick up where it left off, or do you think the virus has pretty much reached all the corners of the US, has mutated itself to be less dangerous, and has generally burned most of its fuel by this point?

Herd immunity is NOT an all or nothing issue nor are masks, spacing, and quarantines an all or nothing issue. Quarantines, as I’ve said, have traditionally been used to isolate the contagious, not the uninfected. And historically, public health and preventive medicine have relied on educational efforts to the public at large, not the police power if the state (which inarguably INCREASED the death toll in NY, NJ, and other states through their mandate for Nursing homes to accept contagious patients. Historically, public health and preventive medicine people have also told the truth. Masks DO help, and always did, although it’s a statistical thing not an absolute. When the problem is that we’ve totally screwed over our medical supply logistics by depending on China and we want to save all the best masks for the ER, ICU, and other uninfected at greatest risk you coukd perhaps just TELL PEOPLE THAT, rather than telling them that masks are bad for you (but good for healthcare personnel) and losing credibility right off the bat (no pun intended).

But no, I said what I said, that the course of an epidemic is to take the most susceptible first, and that is what has happened leaving us less susceptible to a second wave than we were to the first one, and yes, it is normal in the evolution of pathogens for them to evolve toward less pathogenicity, to take longer to kill the infected (or not kill them at all) to permit a longer period of contagion and that over time organisms become less and less lethal. But none of these are binary all or nothing responses. It is a qualitative difference. That would argue not that a second wave couldn’t happen but that statistically it is likely to be less severe than the first, How much less severe would depend on many variables including how many more of the resistant or relatively resistant people are out there.