caucus99percent

free-range politics, organic community

When a big change in life occurs how should you feel? What should you do? How should you move forward? Since 1969 the path way many Americans use is the five DABDA stages (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) described by Dr Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying. It moved from the realm of end of life care and hospice into how to manage change in business and all aspects of major disruptive transitions in life.

For me Acceptance became not a stage to achieve, rather letting go of Denial, Fear, Anger and Depression to let in rational thought. Life may not be what I want, it does become easier to live, make changes and move into the directions I desire.

Over time the five stages have morphed into 7 steps on a Change Curve
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0bO3o4iZHY]

The following calculations are rough and do not use any fancy epidemiological equations. The poor availability of testing and flaky reporting of outcomes make it difficult to know exactly what the numbers are.

According to Johns Hopkins on April 16, 2020:

Case fatality rate 4.5%
Confirmed cases 636,350
Deaths 28,326
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/cumulative-cases

Witness, for example, this gem from the Nation magazine:

An Open Letter to the New New Left From the Old New Left

President Trump wants to re-open the economy, and that means that I should automatically oppose it because it will cause some people to die.
That is 100% true.

But will more people die if we continue the lockdown?
This is not a hyperbolic question.

Stanford's John Ioannidis, who really knows his stuff, has released a preprint of an article that analyses mortality rates of Covid-19 in folks > 80 years of age versus folks < 65 years of age. I found the preprint because it was referenced from a site that BlueRepublic had linked to in his COVID-19 Deep Dive - Swiss Propaganda Research essay.

I'd like to focus on something other than the Democratic Party's sham primary. The reason is this: though it takes a leader to lead a movement, the movement is--must be--independent of the leader. People projected onto Bernie a genuine hope that he could change the Democratic Party, either by taking it over or at least pulling it further left, and that by so doing America's political landscape itself would be improved.

The Federal Government has failed us remarkably with regards to COVID-19. Not only were they not prepared for any pandemic; they purposefully did not act. They did not ramp up testing, they did not provide the essential PPE, they lagged on guidelines for social distancing. And now there are reports of the feds “reallocating” medical supplies for political purposes.

Remember that the first confirmed case of coronavirus was Nov 17. That’s five months ago. The WHO shipped their first tests on Feb 4, the same day that the first faulty CDC test kits were sent out.