Another Potential Corona Game Changer?
Posted: Mon May 18, 2020 11:03 am
A vaccine would be great, but I'm not sure it really changes the game. Even fast tracked and mass produced using our full capability it won't be available for another year, and we're likely to have some hard times in the meantime.
I just read this article from the Brookings Institute. It's a liberal think tank, so I'm guessing it will be met with some skepticism here, but if the trend they've identified continues things are going to get worse. Essentially they've looked at a ton of data and concluded that Covid-19 is spreading fast in areas where Trump has strong political support. That leads to two worrisome conclusions - first that Trump's tendency to downplay the severity of the pandemic is influencing the extent to which his supporters protect themselves, and second, that the virus is spreading away from the heavily urbanized Eastern Seaboard and into smaller communities in the South and Midwest. That's bad news. Another piece of bad news is that half of the states that are pushing hard to reopen have yet to meet the CDC recommendations for safely doing so and their rates of infection are rising rather than falling.
I hope that we don't run headlong into the nightmare scenario of having another huge outbreak at a time when the economy is already crippled from the last one.