Why are Americans are so Dumb?

[NipperDog]

I wish I could 'Like' posts the way we can over on AK.

[NipperDog]

The latest on CNN:

White House Blocks CDC from Testifying on Reopening Schools

How much weirder can all this become?

[RickeyM]

Originally Posted by NipperDog

The latest on CNN:

White House Blocks CDC from Testifying on Reopening Schools

How much weirder can all this become?

With tRump in office and desperately trying to remain in office that's a question you don't want to ask.

[NipperDog]

Originally Posted by RickeyM

With tRump in office and desperately trying to remain in office that's a question you don't want to ask.

I see your point. I think the answer would keep me up at night.

[NipperDog]

I tried to edit out the extra "are" in my title but wasn't able to. If a moderator can do that for me, I'd appreciate it.

[Oerets]

Originally Posted by NipperDog

I tried to edit out the extra "are" in my title but wasn't able to. If a moderator can do that for me, I'd appreciate it.

Arrrrr, just thought you were a Pirate for the day!

[NipperDog]

Originally Posted by Oerets

Arrrrr, just thought you were a Pirate for the day!

I wish I were!

I need a little excitement for a change.

[bobabode]

Originally Posted by NipperDog

I tried to edit out the extra "are" in my title but wasn't able to. If a moderator can do that for me, I'd appreciate it.

For some odd reason I'm not getting an option to edit the title. I can delete the thread and you can start over. Let me know.

[NipperDog]

Originally Posted by bobabode

For some odd reason I'm not getting an option to edit the title. I can delete the thread and you can start over. Let me know.

Hmmm, maybe it's because I tried doing it myself first. I guess we can just leave it as is.

Thanks for giving it a shot.

[FordGT90]

Originally Posted by NipperDog

Why in the hell do we have to politicize EVERYTHING?

Because everything is shades of gray, not black and white. It fundamentally comes down to brain function: left or right brained. Left tends to approach things from a emotional perspective while right approaches things from a logical perspective. These two perspectives naturally create conflict and government was established to find a workable compromise in between that all can agree to. "What is wrong with us?" General unwillingness to compromise.

Originally Posted by NipperDog

It makes perfect sense to be wearing a face covering while there's an (airborne) epidemic.

A huge part of this falls on WHO. Until very recently, they were insisting COVID-19 wasn't airborne. Misinformation for months can't be dispelled in days. The media has done a terrible job with educating the general public about documented super spreader cases. Face coverings are also not a black and white thing but that's a huge subject to get in to. See reply to nailer below.

Originally Posted by Oerets

Oblivious or uncaring were the "Americans". I only say this because "they" do not even consider anyone else fro North and South America as such....

That's a demonym derived from shortening "United States of America." "Unitedonian?" "Statist?" "American?" Pretty obvious why American won out. Bare in mind that every state has its own demonym like "New Yorker," "Wyomingite," "Californian," "Hawaiian," etc. USA is an odd ball because it started out as a federation of independent states. A state is "a politically organized body of people usually occupying a definite territory, especially one that is sovereign." Sovereign is defined as a "supreme power especially over a body politic" and "freedom from external control." When the Constitution was ratified, states were sovereign: they could mint their own coinage, make deals with foreign governments, and so on. That hasn't been the case since the Civil War. US states are now more like provinces: they are political bodies but they're not sovereign.

So with that background, calling someone from Spain Spanish was like calling someone from Pennsylvania Pennsylvanian. They were very similar in terms of context and meaning. While the old demonyms still stick...especially when people from one state are referring to people from another state, the American demonym has superseded all of the state demonyms internationally because the federal government is now the only sovereign state in the United States of America.

"North Americans" refers to all people in North America; "South Americans" refers to all people in South America; "Latin Americans" refers to all people in Latin America; "Central Americans" refers to all people in Central America. One could refer to "American" as anyone from the North and South American continental plates which is also ironically true because since the United States of America was formed, it proactively worked to keep European powers out of the Western hemisphere.

Originally Posted by NipperDog

I think the biggest mistake the experts could have made was for them to say "you're wearing a mask for the other guy."

Only N95 has the remote chance of stopping you from getting sick from someone else. From the very beginning, they said the public should not use N95 masks because of the shortage being experienced by medical staff. Surgical masks and down are about keeping your sickness to yourself. In other words, their advice was consistent with availability and intent.

Originally Posted by Oerets

Would they allow a surgeon and nurses to operate on them without a mask?

Hippocratic oath: do no harm. No one can ask a medical professional to do anything that may be unsafe. Case in point: all staff in operating rooms are decked out in personal protective equipment because infection is always the greatest risk with surgery. Even with all the mitigation they do, it's still not enough because infections are still common.

Originally Posted by NipperDog

Yeah, and then you have Trump saying "I don't agree with Dr. Fauci" about how to handle covid. Why would anyone even care if he disagrees with medical professionals about how to handle a pandemic? What qualifies him to even have an opinion on anything scientific?!

Because Fauci does not have to weigh risks versus benefits in regards to economy (ability for people to sustain themselves) nor public opinion because he's not up for reelection. In democracies, people often get from their leaders what they ask for because to not do so is unpopular. See George H. W. Bush's campaign for a second term.

Originally Posted by nailer

The ignorant are fearful and fighting mask wearing is an expression of ignorant fear.

That's kind of a backwards way at looking at it. Who is fearful? The people wearing masks. Let's just review all the facts to date regarding masks...

1) All masks are not created equal. N95, surgical, and medical masks are unique in that they're created using non-woven polypropylene plastic, not cloth, as a filtration medium. Why plastic? It's hydrophobic (water resistant). Most life on Earth requires water to function. Most bacteria and viruses are no different. Plastic is used because it deprives, as best as possible, the moisture from the bacteria and viruses so they can't thrive on the filtration medium. Cloth masks, on the other hand, are made from various fibers (cloth, wool, paper, etc.) which are not hydrophobic. They quickly become a Petri dish amplifying whatever illnesses are present by drastically increasing viral load (virus exhaled into the mask, then inhaled deeper into the lungs than it was before causing more infection sites in the body). Those made from non-woven polypropylene do this as well but at a much slower rate because they're plastic.

2) When news broke of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan area, the world (including companies like 3M) showered China with PPE in hopes that they could contain it and stop it from spreading. While that decision came from the right place initially, it left much of the world completely unprepared to deal with it when it eventually escaped containment.

3) The places where the virus was initially contained did two things:
3a) Draconian lockdown: people in Wuhan said they feared starvation more than anything else. It wasn't the virus they feared, it was what the government would do to them if they didn't obey. How many places in the world do people choose starvation over disobeying the government? The Chinese lockdown methods won't work in the West in general because people love their freedom too much to let it go over a virus.
3b) medical/surgical masks were widely available to the public: Japan, South Korea, and China, the masks are starting to dwindle and we're seeing the impact of this with new outbreaks frequently.

4) Back to the general shortage of masks: the entire world needs to produce and distribute roughly 14 billion medical/surgical masks or better per day (they're only good for 8 hours of continuous use--hospital staff are generally unprotected at home). As far as I know, the real number is less than 500 million with most of those coming from China and China taking most of them for themselves.

5) Well why not ramp production? Because there's only so much manufacturing capability to produce non-woven polypropylene on a given day. On top of that, that material needs special adhesives to bind straps and the like to it. Several years ago, there was actually a shortage of the adhesive and production of the masks came to a stand still globally. There simply isn't enough of anything to seriously ramp production. Nationalizing the industry isn't going to overcome those shortages either. No one was fundamentally prepared for this and it shows.

6) There's only been one Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) for cloth masks and it showed they massively underperform medical-grade masks:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25903751/
When COVID-19 broke out, they were asked specifically about cloth masks versus no mask and basically said only use cloth masks in the highest of risk environments when there's no alternative and don't reuse it because the masks themselves quickly become transmission vectors.

7) At the same time, we have studies out of China that only linked 1 out of over 300 super spreader events to outdoors and an US federal research lab discovered that sunlight is the best anti-SARS-CoV-2 tool we have. China also contract traced an incident where air conditioning airflow in a restaurant was implicated in a super spreader event, not contact. All of this has lead to over 200 scientists to implore WHO to change their recommendations which they're finally doing.

So putting it all together, here's the facts as we know them:
1) only medical grade masks are remotely effective
2) medical grade masks are scarce
3) cloth masks increase chance of getting influenza-like illnesses
4) only effective counter is direct, intense sunlight
5) central air is strongly implicated in viral spread

These facts explain why Arizona, Florida, Texas, and California are getting hammered by the virus (especially point #5).

Originally Posted by NipperDog

White House Blocks CDC from Testifying on Reopening Schools

White House "blocked" Fauci from testifying back when COVID-19 breakout began but that didn't actually stop him from testifying, did it? The White House has the power to extend "executive privilege" to its members because individual opinions are not a function of government execution. Congress only has a duty to question what the White House does as a matter of policy, not says or thinks. The actions of the White House are a matter of public record. At the same time, the White House can't take away an employee's first amendment rights. The worst it can do is fire or recall the individual. Fundamentally, it's up to the individual whether to testify or not; White House just provides a legal umbrella that they don't have to if they don't want to because they already have the policy facts.