Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Still absolutely zero evidence it came from a Chinese lab.  I have no idea why this became a thing in the first place.

Because China.

That was great.  I copied and posted it on Facebook as something I heard from this dude.

Let's talk about opening up for a minute, and what that could mean.

Worst case scenario is this:  We open up too early, we hit a second, more severe round, our hospitals get overwhelmed, and we have to go back to strict social distancing or somehow live with a death toll of hundreds of thousands.  You think the economy is bad now?  I can't even begin to speculate how bad it would be.

Best case scenario:  We do a controlled opening, Coronavirus never really goes away, but also doesn't overwhelm the hospitals.  Death tolls continue to be in the 500-3000 per day range.  People learn to live with social distancing and make the best of it.  Restaurants and other businesses try and survive with a fraction of pre-outbreak customers.  Almost a guaranteed recession.  Major gatherings of people is still probably prohibited for the next few months, and possibly years.

The point of my long screed was that Americans will not stand for strict social distancing over the long haul. People are already starting to self-open--stay-at-home percentage peaked on Apr 12, Apple mobility trends show a trough in requested directions about the same time and significant uptick since then, etc--so it seems that even if there's nowhere to go people were going out more. And then we're starting to already see direct civil disobedience regarding businesses opening in direct contravention of the orders. So I think we can remove "strict social distancing" from the equation. 

The other point of my screed was that if we don't control the opening at all, we end up in your worst case scenario. People will just frankly give up completely on social distancing and it could get really ugly.

So a controlled opening is about all we have as an option. You have to give people something to remain hopeful, but if you can do it slowly perhaps you can limit any explosion in cases and keep it manageable. This won't go away, so the "best case scenario" you highlight is about all we can hope for.

As odd as it seems to say this, I think Florida is actually a really good example of this. Slow and careful, but if you show people progress they might not completely lose their minds. 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-04/scientists-create-antibody-that-defeats-coronavirus-in-lab?utm_campaign=news&utm_medium=bd&utm_source=applenews


Scientists created a monoclonal antibody that can defeat the new coronavirus in the lab, an early but promising step in efforts to find treatments and curb the pandemic’s spread.

The experimental antibody has neutralized the virus in cell cultures. While that’s early in the drug development process -- before animal research and human trials -- the antibody may help prevent or treat Covid-19 and related diseases in the future, either alone or in a drug combination, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Communications.

More research is needed to see whether the findings are confirmed in a clinical setting and how precisely the antibody defeats the virus, Berend-Jan Bosch of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and colleagues wrote in the paper.


The antibody known as 47D11 targets the spike protein that gives the new coronavirus a crown-like shape and lets it enter human cells. In the Utrecht experiments, it didn’t just defeat the virus responsible for Covid-19 but also a cousin equipped with similar spike proteins, which causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/04/us-treasury-seeks-to-borrow-a-record-3-trillion-this-quarter.html

One quarter, $3 trillion borrowed, not just spent, but borrowed, from someone, somewhere, probably mostly the Fed with Fed money.  At historically low interest rates.  This to me is weird.

This pandemic has laid bare the lack of faith in our institutions in this country.

In the best case scenario (best reasonable case), this was going to be awful. The chances that everyone played this just right from the beginning--no matter who--were low. But assuming that it isn't handled perfectly, not because of malice, but because of the reality of how the world works, one of the real tragedies is everyone's mistrust of others, based largely on politics and nothing else.

I'm not immune to it. My biases aren't hard to find, so I'll state one of them bluntly here: if this White House says it, I don't believe it. Full stop. Not unless it gets independently verified.

In different times I would not have assumed that the administration's response to a terrible pandemic was automatically not just questionable, but likely false. I thought both Bush administrations did a lot of things wrong, but in the immediate aftermath of emergencies, I believed they were doing all they could to respond as effectively as possible. I believe that the career government officials still are, but my trust in the current administration is so low that even in the face of an actual emergency--like this one--I doubt its motives.

My response is not a healthy one in a democracy (or any government, really).

Although I believe this administration is uniquely untrustworthy, I also recognize that there has been an intentional attack on our faith in our governmental institutions, and in many ways where we find ourselves today is an entirely predictable result of that attack.

This is not to say that we should just trust our government. Clearly we have an obligation to test it to make sure that those we put in charge are acting in We the People's interest, not their own. Reagan's admonition to "trust, but verify" rings true.

I remain surprised that the response to a pandemic is so highly politicized. It isn't as though our government made some deliberate decisions that created this pandemic. It was always going to be reactive, not proactive. And yet--even in this reactive mode, a complete lack of trust (whether it's for the White House--in my case--or for governors--in other cases). Whatever the case, right now there are large blocks of people who don't believe that the democracy they elected works for them. That is deeply concerning. I still believe in the electoral process for selecting my government, but I fear that too many others do not.

I assume this pandemic--as all others--will pass, or at least come under control. My bigger concern is the health of our democracy when our levels of vitriol and lack of trust are so high.