RiverDog wrote:The movement of people as represented on the NYT graphic is not speculation. It's based on data reported to them by a company that tracks cell phone usage. Here is the link to their website:
https://www.cuebiq.com/The location data, from Cuebiq, a data intelligence firm, measures the range that people travel each day. It cannot predict where outbreaks will spread, and it does not track how many interactions people had while they were traveling.
The divide in travel patterns, based on anonymous cellphone data from 15 million people, suggests that Americans in wide swaths of the West, Northeast and Midwest have complied with orders from state and local officials to stay home. Disease experts who reviewed the results say those reductions in travel — to less than a mile a day, on average, from about five miles — may be enough to sharply curb the spread of the coronavirus in those regions, at least for now.
In areas where public officials have resisted or delayed stay-at-home orders, people changed their habits far less. Though travel distances in those places have fallen drastically, during the week of March 23 they were still typically more than three times those in areas that had imposed lockdown orders, the analysis shows.
Other areas reduced travel weeks ago, the data show, especially in California, New York and Washington, which were the first to experience large outbreaks. Most people have essentially stopped traveling in those places for weeks, the data show, a sign that they are taking the measures seriously.If you had the ability to see the map I'm talking about, you couldn't help but to be impressed. People in an area bordered by Texas and Oklahoma on the west to Virginia and Florida in the east to Kentucky and Virginia on the north, the southeast, 13 states, 9 of which have Republican governors and all but one that voted for Trump in 2016, that hesitated imposing social distancing measures, were traveling a lot more than people in other parts of the country, including states like Montana and the Dakotas with much wider distances to cover. Unless you can invalidate the cell phone data, the conclusions are inescapable. There's no other way to explain those discrepancies.
And as far as your little dig about my reading
"article after article" of liberal publications, that is a "kill the messenger" defense that I'd expect out of Idahawkman, not from you. I have over 30 sources on my personalized news feed, including Fox, Brietbart, The WSJ, The National Review, and the NY Post and have reference articles from those sources in this forum.
I am still not seeing the relevance of your data as other than a means to justify your opinion of Trump and his supporters. The liberal states are getting hit worse like New Jersey and New York, right? And they're engaged in heavy social distancing and stronger measures more quickly? You don't seem to get you are watching a giant experiment that hasn't been done before on how to deal with a global pandemic. That is why your blame of Trump is so ridiculous to me. This is literally a never been seen before on this scale situation that is being used to test different methods of how to combat it. There is no unified response to it and shouldn't be because there is no sure way to stop it or control it or consensus on the best way to go about it.
Like I told you, certain nations are doing like the Republican states and are just fine. Sweden, no real restrictions. Netherlands, no real restrictions. Japan, no real restrictions. All doing as well or better than us. You're going to have to wait and see how all these measures worked. We won't know that until this thing is mostly done. Then we can check and see whose plans worked the best, whose economies stayed mostly solvent, why certain things happened like Italy and Spain, and why Germany who did less than us is mostly fine. Basically, we will have to review worldwide response and see what worked best and where and why, for future planning.
That's the part you're not seeming to accept. It isn't a one size fits all world. And it isn't being affected the same. That will have to be figured out after this is done.
So some map showing traveling is not relevant unless you have also have supporting case data showing that it caused worse outbreaks. Right now, I want to see whose method worked better. If the Netherlands and Sweden whose experts told them to impose minimal restrictions and isolate older folks worked better, caused less death, and kept their economy more solvent, and the data clearly shows that then that is a better method than we used. So if they traveled more, then add it to the data pool and let's how it affected the more wide open Southern States.
But as far as what I believe they will find at the end of this is the following:
1. Population Density requires more social distancing and stronger measures than less population dense areas and faster.
2. Masks (even non-medical) help and should be ramped up for all even if non-medical masks. They aren't essential, but are helpful.
3. More spread out states and areas can better maintain normalcy if they practice caution than population dense states and cities. Industry and life in those states should be maintained with caution.
4. The measures taken here were too strong, panic-driven, and poorly thought out causing more economic destruction than prevented deaths.
5. Older populations living with younger generations is a huge risk.
6. Nations with better economies and technology will handle this better than those with less healthy economies and lower tech like Spain and Italy. I still can't believe Spain and Italy are rated so highly as
I5 listed. That seems nuts to me. It just shows the divide between liberalism's belief that widespread availability is somehow better than technology through capitalism whose tech eventually gets passed down to the lower income groups, which I believe is a superior option long-term.
That is what I think they will find at the end of this. We will see. And I won't blame a single person right or left for the reasoning as you have to over-react, then learn, then plan better next time when a once in a lifetime pandemic occurs.
