This thread is instructive at highlighting the conservative approach to COVID. To recap:
- COVID is no more dangerous than the seasonal flu
- the number of COVID deaths reported by the media is wildly misleading fake news
AND YET
-
Democrat governors irresponsibly sent patients with this extremely dangerous (?!) disease back to nursing homes
- This extremely dangerous (?!) disease then spread in nursing homes, causing tens of thousands of COVID deaths which are totally real
These contradictory positions are part and parcel of being an American conservative in the 21st century. Let's cover a couple of these issues.
Nursing homes:
Early on in this outbreak, with hospitals being stretched beyond capacity and severely insufficient availability of tests (and, of course, grossly inadequate help from the federal government), some Democratic governors in states with major outbreaks made the decision to free up hospital beds for the sickest COVID patients by sending elderly patients
who were not currently exhibiting COVID symptoms to a nursing home if they had medical issues able to be treated there.
With proper assistance by a competent federal government - say, by the Army Corps of Engineers being fully deployed to build multiple hospitals in outbreak sites across the nation, or by rapid testing being made available to everyone who needs it (as South Korea did) - making the difficult choice of
who gets a hospital bed would not have been necessary. But our federal gov't is completely incompetent, so the unenviable choice was "Who gets this hospital bed?" without the testing necessary to make sure those not currently asymptomatic were not carriers.
Masks:
Again, early on in this pandemic, we faced huge shortages of PPE across the country. Medical personnel was forced to use-and-reuse the few masks that they had available, while the Trump Administration insisted that the federal stockpile of medical supplies
"isn't for states to use". So, faced with this shortage of PPE, medical experts advised everyday citizens NOT to start hoarding masks, and to refrain from buying up this PPE so that medical personnel could have the supplies they desperately needed to do their jobs.
Now, months later, conservatives claim that liberals were "against masks" before they were for them. Liberals were
never "against masks"; we said that if you're a layman, you should forego buying up masks so that the professionals who need them can get them during a widespread shortage.
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In order to have a productive discussion, it is first fundamentally necessary for both sides to have good-faith intellectual honesty in their positions. So to the conservatives here, I ask you three simple questions:
1) Does COVID present an exceptional and noteworthy danger?
2) Are lockdowns effective at reducing the danger COVID presents?
3) Are masks effective at reducing the danger COVID presents?
Without a definitive answer to these questions, further discussion is pointless. It cannot be true that
Trump is to be praised for his bold lockdown of the country that was opposed by the Democrats AND
lockdowns do nothing and are a waste of time.