You can see all the rumblings that the government will do another shutdown in September. Be essential or be bankrupt.

OOps- that was Ms. Richards from Planned Infanticide

imgflip.com/i/45nazx

Who will ever forget those tear filled days of cemeteries in Central Park because we were overwhelmed by all those nursing home dea....... er uh, or how about the thousands that had to be treated on hospital ships and in make shift hospitals because the hospitals were utterly overwhel........ or the instant death that was mutating and going to kill everyone if we didn't hide like little babies in our basements, oh. It raged through the US with fully 0.0004% of our population dead.

Uh, one city council member mistakenly said this.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/11/fact-check-nyc-wont-use-local-parks-temporary-burial-grounds/5133460002/

It was quickly refuted by the mayor and a spokesperson for the city Office of Chief Medical Examiner.

The steps taken to minimize the spread of Covid during it's initial outbreak may have been essential to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. Which some were in the initial days as supplies were in short supply and in high demand such as personal protective equipment and in some cases, we're still low on respirators in many parts of the country.

The death isn't instant. It was never reported as such. In fact, the problem is that it takes almost two weeks for symptoms to occur, potentially deadly symptoms, if they occur at all. And even if you're lucky enough to be among the majority to not have any potentially deadly symptoms, you still had a chance of spreading the disease to others during incubation period allowing for the virus to have a high fatality rate.

It has not raged through the US. It is still raging. The only thing that seems to have slowed it down was lock downs. We're still getting thousands of new cases a day and hundreds of deaths a week, if not a day.

‭0.0356% of our population are dead... so far. As again, this crisis is far from over. There is still a chance that it can have a resurgence twice as deadly come the fall.

True, it may not happen. Just like most hospitals in our country was not overwhelmed. But the key thing about precautions is that they are usually taken to prevent a thing from happening. Call it better safe than sorry. And, again, there were reports of medical personal short on PPE for weeks. So, I'd say that the precautions were necessary since there were so few hospitals overwhelmed.

But the primary reason people are concerned about Covid-19 is that it has a higher than normal fatality rate for a respiratory virus. 1% or higher. The current fatality rate in the US is 5.5% And it has remained steady for months now. Meaning we should be treating this virus seriously and not as the common flu.

And certainly not a hoax.

Respectfully speaking, each and every lie, ahem mis-statement of fact, sticks. There are thousands who believe Central Park is the site of mass graves, in fact it was only reefer vans that ran out of fuel and started decomposing bodies at an accelerated rate outside of back logged mortuaries.
I encounter panicked people on a daily basis who believe it is an instant and certain death sentence.
Nurses, hospital staff and DOCTORS have been laid off because of the over reaction, basically shutting down hospitals to any other healthcare not related to COVID19. In communities near me a 400 bed hospital had 4 hospitalizations laid off 40% of their staff, have re-hired 5%. Another in a hard hit area- 100 bed hospital 4 total hospitalizations - hospital is presently preparing to file for bankruptcy. Another 78 bed hospital 1 hospitalization. Laid off 35% of employees. No rehire to date.
You do now that the common cold is a coronavirus, right? Our immune systems have evolved to deal with the virus so that it isn't a grave illness. Same virus, differing responses, no big deal.
People with underlying conditions (morbidities) die from complications of the common cold. As an asthmatic I can assure you a cold can go right to pneumonia if I don't stay on top of it. Been hospitalized for pneumonia three times after I turned 60.
As someone trained in statistics, all the percentages thrown out for COVID 19 are meaningless. We have no random, weighted baseline of the presence or absence of COVID 19 in the general population. We have no idea the extent of infection. We have no idea of the total asymptomatic cases, no idea of how many cases sought no medical care due to mild or manageable symptoms. To claim a 5% mortality is a lie......... uh gross exaggeration of facts. The only real numbers we have to deal with are total deaths and total population. Cancer has a nationwide 2019 death rate using these numbers of 0.0018. Covid 19 0.00036. Covid deaths are less than 20% of annual cancer deaths.
Initially we were told 3 feet apart, then 6, no masks, won't do any good, masks all day every day now. Doesn't kill young, kills young, doesn't does. Church attendance kills and spreads, riots don't kill or spread. Heart disease is the leading cause, accidents #3m Chronic lower respiratory disease #4- still more than COVID19. Not all that is being sold is the truth.

People believing one person, who was wrong, doesn't make the whole thing a hoax.

People not getting the facts because they failed to do any of the reading doesn't make it a hoax.

Hospitals being mismanaged is not proof that coronavirus is a hoax.

No, the corornavirus is not the common cold. You're thinking of the rhinovirus. Coronaviruses are similar to the common cold but they are not the same. The key difference is the infection of the lungs, while the common cold is a severe sinus infection.

It has been hypothesized that the people who are symptomatic may have a combination of Covid-19 and a second complication that weakens the respiratory system; both probably innocuous but the mixture of the two makes it potentially fatal.

No, that is not how statistics work. You do not ignore data because it is incomplete. You constantly collect the data and analyze and make decisions on it. There is certainly a margin error but that error margin would be much worse if the problem was ignored.

I never claimed the mortality was 5%. I said, that the fatality rate in the US is 5%.

According to the CDC, we have 117,632 and we have a population of 330,938,757. That is ‭0.0356% of the population dead, not 0.00036% Perhaps you forgot to multiply by 100 to get the percentage? That would account for your error. Someone, I would think, who trained in statistics would not forget but it's an easy mistake if you're not prone to double checking your work.

Personally, I've always heard 6 feet or two meters. This would be to minimize the exhaling of water droplets from the nose and mouth.

Only people spreading misinformation have said anything negative about the usefulness of masks. No, masks will not protect you from Covid-19 but they will help prevent the spread of it.

People have made observations about the nature of the virus, and people misinterpret them as fact, only to be proven wrong over time. We made similar mistakes about AIDS and HIV. And people still get it wrong on how that disease is spread, unfortunately.

No one said riots don't cause the spread. However, I've never been a fan of people being arrested or fined even when people were protesting the lock down.

Heart disease not being a leading factor but rather, those with heart disease are susceptible. Respiratory disease and poor immune systems are the leading cause.

"Not all that is being sold is the truth."
True, but nothing you're selling is true at all. Probably because you didn't do the research.

As someone who thinks percentages are meaningless, but understands statistics, then you would know that we cannot rely on the fact that 0.036% of the population have died. Especially if more people die. But what we can calculate is how many people have died who have had the virus. And, in the US it's 5%. 5.5% specifically while Worldwide it's 5.3%.

Heck, if we remove New York, which alone has a fatality rate of 7.6%; the US has a fatality rate of 4.9%. And while you may even argue that that is still low, the governments and science organizations of the world take anything above a 1% fatality rate very seriously. And this is 5 times as critical with the current data. You can't sit there and say this is just as deadly as cancer, which has a negligible infection rate, and the flu or the common cold which has the average fatality rate in the US of 0.3%, in fact.. in 2019, the fatality rate for reported cases in the US was 0.2% with only 34,200 deaths. Covid-19 has over 118,365 deaths in the US. 78,759 deaths without counting New York, Florida, and California. Still higher than the flu.

Not a hoax.

While it is a real virus, with real mortality, it is a politically inspired hoax.

That's moving the goal posts a bit to say that it's a hoax while also being a real thing. Since the political aspect of Covid-19 is more wait and see than the actual virus, I'm refraining from framing it in such a way. I know this is ironic given this is the politics stream; but there isn't a virulent stream. Wait is there? And too many people on both sides are using this as a political vehicle while misrepresenting the facts. That's my main point of contention to the political aspect no matter which side of the political coin you're calling during this election year's toss-up.

Not really moving the goal posts. I know it's a horrible virus, I've had the damn stuff. I fought the lung stuff for 3 months, then it suddenly went away. I'm a prime time candidate for death according to the experts, and so are several hundred people I've talked to who say they had all the symptoms too, with various reactions to it.
When this has been distorted and manipulated so much that intelligent people are panicking when they see someone without a mask, as if everyone is contaminated and everyone is a carrier and literally running away from each other (I have seen this more than a dozen times in the last week), intelligent people are spraying themselves down with Lysol aerosol spray before they get in a car, when I see minorities fearful of white people thinking white's are invincible carriers who are going to kill them with a virus, I get pissed.
Friend, I have tried to comment with factual data from very credible sources I have the good fortune of knowing that you can fact check. I'm not trying to manipulate anything, just present the truth, on a meme site------- okay I confess I make most of these to email to my friends and then post them for fun and giggles.
I don't have a political agenda regarding COVID19 (except for getting the politics out of this) . COVID19 is not what it has been represented to be, not even close. Is it tragic that 118,000 people have died? Yes, families and friends are hurting. Politicizing this doesn't help anything. Sadly everything is politicized now, and I mean everything.
Bottom line is there is no baseline data set. without that the numbers are subject to manipulation and misinterpretation.

With all due respect, I graduated from college with distinction, of course that doesn't matter. I was taking college level statistics and probability classes as a freshman in high school in preparation for competition at a state level science fair for a project that involved pure science- hypothesis, observation, compilation of data and analysis (at a time when complex calculations were done with slide rules, we did't have more than adding machines and handheld calculators weren't even available). If you want to accuse me of academic ignorance, I hereby take away your birthday.
Around that time I was advised by a wise old man that figures don't lie, but liars can figure. The numbers you cite are gross exaggerations.
You cannot remove the numbers of the top four mortality, horrifically mismanaged states to have a true representation of what has just happened, although if you do it makes the magnitude even less significant.
Medical statisticians who rely on accurate data for projections and medical logistics are frustrated by the inflated numbers they have been given due to the directives to classify any death that tested positive for COVID 19 as a coronavirus cause of death. Convention has been that if someone has a morbidity such as congestive heart failure, kidney failure. pulmonary failure, liver failure, end stage diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's , Lou Gerig's and a list of others and they die of pneumonia (which is a typical end stage condition) that the underlying morbidity is the cause of death, otherwise everyone dies of pneumonia or heart failure.
Even people on hospice who had coronavirus at the time of death are listed as COVID19 deaths. To be on hospice you have to have a diagnosis of 6 months or less to live.
If you discuss this with any virologist who has only scientific interest in the game rather than a vested political interest, they will tell you that this event is (not diminishing the deaths now) is merely a coincidence of where two major flu strains occurred in the same period of time. While that has been rare in modern history it is far from unheard of.
The panic that ensued was because of where this virus was first introduced to humans. The proximity of the Wuhan virology labs to the outbreak, couple with initial reports that this was an engineered virus combining SARS, MERS and HIV scared the living crap out of everyone. That turned out to not be the case, researchers typically combine subtle viruses like coronavirus with other known

(I get ripped for replying to my own comments but F off if it bothers you, this is the only way I know to continue a long thread------- viruses and due to poor practices and substandard equipment the virus was most likely accidentally "leaked" to the general population.
The reality is that if this virus had emerged in a non-election year, it would have been greeted much differently, especially an election year where one candidate's name is Trump. He is a threat to the deep state, and they don't like it, worldwide.

You can reply twice to the same comment as I did. But you can F off if that bothers you too. :p

If it makes you feel any better, I had to remind someone your age that the electorates are not federally selected last week. Ironically, I was accused of saying that very thing a few days later. I technically did not but people are quick to point out the flaws in arguments even if they are minute. I wouldn't expect anything less from a college graduate. I'll have a formal reply for you very soon.

did you just say?

Thinking about your comments a little more, I have tried to be respectful of you, I haven't attacked you personally until you attack me. I have presented facts that you can substantiate, not bad at my age. WTF is that supposed to mean? Do you think I grew up in a cave chasing mastadons or something? You really don't have a clue do you? And I'm truly sorry to say that, I thought you might have something, but I stand corrected. Regurgitate all the news media pulp you want, you'll just be wasting your time. It is not scientific fact, it's political propaganda. Not the same thing.

Hey you know what, read the f-ing meme again then check back in with me in September. If there is is no attempt at another shutdown, I'll admit I was wrong. If there is another shutdown and people loose their jobs and businesses because they didn't make their businesses essential, I still lose, because people will suffer horribly for an agenda.

In regards to your emotional outburst, I was quoting you word for word. And teasing. Hence the emoji.

But you said a few things that I feel compelled to address as well.

"I have tried to be respectful of you, I haven't attacked you personally until you attack me."

Yes, I asked you to double check your work and you gave me your backstory and credentials instead of double checking your work. That leaves me a little annoyed that you think your age and college education means a damn thing if you don't use it. So forgive me for questioning the fact you're a statistician. But if you can't admit you messed up on the math, then I'm not going to bother to continue to question it and will simply deny it's existence. At least, until you have something more substantial to refute it with other than how you couldn't use handheld calculators and political conjecture.

Another thing a college graduate would know is that correlation doesn't equal causation. Just because there may be a second shutdown, doesn't mean you're right. Experts have said from the beginning that Covid-19 may behave similarly to H1N1 from 1918 where there was a second wave in the fall with twice the fatality seen in the spring. So, you're already right that there may be a second shut down, but it doesn't prove that the policies to prevent the spread and fatalities of Covid are just a hoax to bring down Donald Trump. That is ludicrous. And if all the world governments are already capable of coordinating something this big with each other, then Donald Trump never stood a chance in the first place.

1918 was 100 years ago. Medically we have so many advancements that to compare the two is apples and orangutans. Antibiotics weren't in broad use until the 1940s and 1950s, and very primitive at that. Virology was in it's infancy.
Please don't dismiss my college education, you know full well this is not the place for credentials. I ran my numbers more than twice, if you calculate based on a falsehood you get falsehood. It's like multiplying any number times zero, the answer is zero. I've explained baseline about as much as I want, until you get that we don't have anything rational to discuss.
Getting away from math, you really need to understand the Marxist movement. It is world wide and it is "big". I grew up among some of it's young acolytes, I have witnessed the evolution of the revolution for a long time. Google what Frederick Douglas said about the 3/5th compromise. You won't get it anymore like you could 3 months ago, you will get every citation for commentary stating that the 3/5th compromise of the constitution was strictly to advance slavery. It wasn't. When the constitution was ratified the slave states and anti slave north had almost equal populations. If the abolitionists had not compromised we would have had two separate nations side by side, one forever slave. The 3/5th compromise did not say blacks were only 3/5th of a person, it said they would only be counted as 3/5th of a person since they had no right to vote and the weight of representation was shifted in favor of the abolitionists. Within one generation of the ratification of the constitution slavery was abolished by the forethought of the founding fathers. I only say this as an example of what is happening to truth world wide. 3 months ago you would have found what I told you in about 80% of the results. Let me know how many pages you have to scroll down to find that now.
It's the same with coronavirus. There is no truth anymore.

Since you're a statistician, I figure you'd appreciate checking the formulas to calculate your answers.

Fatality Rate:
(Deaths/Infected)x100 = Fatality Rate

You do not calculate the population when determining the fatality rate. However, if you would like to know what percentage of the population have died, you can substitute the number of infected with the population.

(Deaths/Population)x100 = Percentage of people who've died.

118,365 deaths divided by 330,944,050 equals 0.000358. Rounded that is 0.0004. Not 0.0004%, just 0.004. But THEN you have to multiply that by 100 to get the percentage which gives you 0.0358%.

If you cannot accept your error then really there is nothing more to discuss.

For the last time, we don't know how many people have been infected. No baseline. No randomized, weighted for the population= age, race, economics, prior morbidities, travel regions and other key demographic categories. Without that you do not have a true fatality rate, you have the mortality rate for the people who were tested, nothing more.
Please recall, early tests had a high incidence of false negatives. Current antibody tests have a 48% false negative rate, that's a coin toss, it's either right or it's wrong so even the latest testing is unreliable at this point to create a valid working data set.
If I only test the people who died of COVID 19 I could say it's 100% fatal. I'm not trying to talk down to you, does that make sense? If I test 1 million people who never had it, that doesn't tell us anything about a true mortality rate. Without a well done random scientific baseline, the numbers can't tell the accurate story.
Look at the deviation in the models that were used. In some the range was plus or minus 180,000 to 3.1 million fatalities. We trust models that produce a much tighter range, on a scale the size of the US census figures we would really like to see +/- 25,000.
I don't know if it's still up, I was watching it daily to make sense of this stuff, but the changes are so insignificant at this point that once a month is enough to monitor the trends, but on WorldOMeter.org ( I like this site because it's just raw data, no editoriallizing or interpretation, just the straight numbers as they were reported and corrected) they had a link to projections, for some states and some for the national picture. A few of the graph versions showed you just how broad the deviation was. I could say it was sloppy, but it was the best anyone could do with incomplete baseline data.
As I mentioned in another comment, there was a justified panic when this started, but as data started coming in and most importantly, the genetic mapping that was done in record time was distributed, it became apparent that the danger of the virus was horribly overstated. Humanity has an evolved resistance to coronavirus, but how this one was handled guarantees that it will flare again this fall, rather than follow the typical path of other coronavirus outbreaks. Fact is, if you are 80 yo or older, this one is really bad news, everyone else, not so much, just a nasty bug if the conditions are right

All you had to do was multiply by 100.

Between your conspiracy theories and your desperate attempt to escape the math and the facts, I deem you a total liar.

By the way, I’m 84 and have it but you don’t see me using it to shove any kind of agenda down your throat.

Since you feel the need to always have the final word, I’ll ask you one last question to give you one chance to be constructive with your responses.

How exactly are businesses suppose to make themeselves essential?

Sorry typo with the % sign. The percentage 0.036% is still thirty six one thousandths of 1 percent.
I'm 63. Your age reasonably gives you a different perspective on this virus, you are in the kill zone. I'm not too far from it myself. But at your age you should know better than a lot of the stuff you pumped out.
Hospitals from coast to coast were ordered to cease all elective surgeries and ramp up for overwhelming ICU cases. The media did not report that elective surgeries included gall bladder surgeries, transplant surgeries, joint replacement surgeries, cataract and retina surgeries-- do you get the idea? Only in the small handful of hotspots were the hospitals even close to capacity and even then mobile hospitals were closed down after months of sitting idle, caring for not one patient. The Javitt's Center in NYC- virtually no patients. Most hospitals shut down surgery centers and converted them to negative pressure contagion rooms and staff had no patients for months. That is not poorly managed hospitals, that's poorly managed governments- typically state and local- with their guidance coming from a flawed view from the CDC Institutes of Health and WHO.
It was only 5 weeks ago that hospitals were allowed to resume elective surgeries and even then only at about 20% capacity. How do I know? My wife was scheduled for knee replacement surgery 5 days after the national shut down order for a pandemic that never came. She was the second patient scheduled at the hospital where she works to get the surgery 5 weeks ago when hospitals nationwide were permitted to re-open.
Regarding your question, how exactly are businesses suppose to make themselves essential? Really, how are they? If a person is earning a living to support their family, they are essential workers. A business trying to remain a business is essential for every investor, employee and customer.
An unfortunate chain of events killed my career, so I'm driving a truck to finish out my working life. I was a "front line essential worker" through all of this. We worked for months without masks and now we are required to where them everywhere that is reopening. How a business makes themselves essential depends on the state and local govt. Each individual has to decide if it's making hand gel or selling masks or food. Anything to "be" essential in a contrived panic.

Also, I'm not sure you still acknowledged your error? So, I probably shouldn't have replied at all.

A "even if you're right" opening, doesn't absolve you exactly.

The problem with relying on 0.036% being only thirty six one thousandths of 1 percent, which is correct, it's not the final total. As from the beginning of this debate to now, we've lost 1,423 people to Covid-19. 0.036% won't hold. But do you know what is holding? The fatality rate. At 5%.

Is 5% going to be the final fatality rate? No. It may not even be 2.5%. But it's definitely more than 1%, and therefore serious enough to take... well, seriously.

Too many responses, I inadvertently typed a percentage sign. Sorry.

No, you were talking percentages, so it makes perfect sense to use the percentage sign. What you had was an incomplete number being applied as a percentage. You didn't just forget the sign, you forgot a whole step in a calculation of percentages.

The media did not need to report that gall bladder surgeries, transplant surgeries, joint replacement surgeries, cataract and retina surgeries were elective. Most of those are, with the exception of some transplant surgeries. I would know, I've had two of those and my own knee replacement surgery has been postponed indefinitely this year.

You're placing the blame on the CDC and WHO for not coordinating the state and local governments; but I'm afraid that blame should be placed squarely on the federal government for failing to coordinate the efforts to redistribute where and when people could go and to go during this crisis. They were informed that they were essentially on their own and acted with the best of their knowledge while being somewhat in the dark of what was happening beyond their own backyard. True, they were told that the pandemic would overwhelm them and it is good that it didn't.

Emergency rooms and life-saving surgeries were still operational. Should anyone who needed a gall bladder or transplant surgery immediately, then they were bumped up from elective to emergency.

I see, so your meme is essentially a reflection of a contrived panic.

Of course the media didn't report the facts, I don't remember the last time they did. Constitutionally the federal government could not intervene in that way, that's why As soon as the second 14 day emergency ended, management fell entirely to the states with assistance as requested from the feds.
The worst thing about all of this is that un-elected bureaucrats and politicians had no qualms about who they destroyed financially. Out of 5 adult kids 4 were laid off. 2 of them forever as one Canadian company pulled up stakes in the US as a result and one went bankrupt. All were doing well before. The meme is one I made to email out to warn business owners that they best be prepared since most of them are already on the ropes. Posted it here for other opinions which you contributed to greatly.

Constitutionally, the federal government IS allowed to intervene on behalf of the states in a crisis and they botched it.

The worst thing about this was that the President and his administration put the economy first over the American people. The economy would've failed either way if he did not act, and might've survived if he had acted sooner if not better than how he did. Could he have done better? No. Could someone else have done better? Absolutely. The problem of having a incompetent and inexperienced leader is that they are slower to act than one who is competent (even if semi-competent) but experienced. This is why there was a Task Force put in place for Covid-19 and why Pence was in it.

Not due to Pence's experience with outbreaks, of which he was not the leader of the Task Force but of it's more bureaucratic areas, but because Pence has more experience with what protocols the Federal government can do than what the President would be familiar with. I've said many times that Trump ought to step down and just let Pence do the job. Not that I think much of Pence but I think our resources would be better spent on someone who can not only absorb a bunch of information but also retain it without having to just agree with whomever is in the room at the time that can, and inevitably will, change his mind as if they explain what is in it for him.

Oh, and you weren't in error for not typing the %. Though you did fail to the last few times you erroneously claimed 0.0004. You actually said 0.0004%. Which is not 0.04% which is what you should have said if you actually did the calculations right.

Some final thoughts, and not trying to get the final word here. At age 84 I would think you dealt with the small pox and polio quarantines since they were pretty widespread. The sick were quarantined, the vulnerable were isolated and the healthy were permitted to continue their lives with cautions.
In my last career I received frequent and extensive safety training. There are limits to what a paper mask can do, also, the procedures for avoiding cross contamination are pretty technical, even well trained professionals blow it. That's why our safety training and certification were continuous. In my travels I've seen people take off gloves, then put them back on inside out, I've seen them get in their cars and continue wearing their gloves, essentially contaminating their cars. And in classic large urban style I've watched hundreds peel off the gloves and throw them on the ground instead of walking 15 feet to a trash can.
In this setting all the so called protections are useless.
You probably recall from your high school biology days, there are several ways the protective coating around a virus are broken down, one being good old soap and water like our mothers admonished us. Wash your hands and don't pick your nose would be far more effective recommendations from our heath experts than the elaborate requirements of 3 or 6 feet separation , at all times or for no more than 10 minutes, wear a mask, don't wear a mask. Healthy people only need to wear a mask when caring for an infected person, wear a mask when you are alone in a car. There were never clear and effective guidelines given.
The initial shutdown was not intended to stop the contagion, it was supposed to be 2 weeks to let hospitals ramp up, that got extended by 2 more weeks then morphed into the only thing we could do. Meanwhile (and I've argued this point at a number of safety conferences) time and intensity exposure was exacerbated by forcing everyone into limited retail settings for food and necessities, reducing public transportation and packing people together more tightly instead of adding more capacity and dispersing travelers. There has been a cascade of poor decisions counter intuitive to what would be more effective. If certain big box retailers could safely serve the public, what would prevent an independent business from being able to develop their own safety procedures? The decision to create bankruptcy conditions for so many businesses is akin to war crimes.

Oh yes, there is a gross negligence with the general public in how to properly handle PPE. That I agree to no end. Spreading misinformation on how to handle or how ineffective these things are do nothing to contain that ignorance.

There are guidelines given, but people continue to ignore them. Perhaps a consequence of the federal government downplaying the role of the media for the last three years? If not the last twenty.

You're right that the purposed shut down was suppose to be for two weeks, however the incubation of the virus is much longer and not everyone is getting it at the exact same time. So it was entirely reasonable to extend the shut down to three-to-four weeks. That was when the federal government objected to such severe precautions, perhaps realizing the effect it would have on the economy, and businesses began overeating weeks before the shut down even began. Leaving the states to decide when and if they should even shut down thereby making any shutdown that was not coordinated by the federal government effectively useless.

And then we became the highest infected country in the world at the conclusion of the first two weeks of shut down.

Is there any wonder why it failed?