We're Number One!

[mickeycrimm]

If I hated people, I wouldn't be on here emphasizing how bad this is going to be. This site, if you'll notice, is filled with deniers and people who take non-experts' opinions over experts'.

I'm trying to get people to wake up a day, two days, a week ahead of what they might otherwise do if they listened to the optimistic posts on this site. Cut off the social interaction, jam your optimism, and be prepared. I've been ahead of the curve because I've read the international papers for months and have some sense of what a pandemic is, partly because my late wife's research had to do with Native Americans at time of contact, when they were wiped out by pandemics.

The last 36 hours point towards this being far, far worse than I thought it would be, and I thought it would be horrendous.

SOOPOO is a doctor who is either retired or close to it. He's responding to redietz:

Mickey, I don't know why you even bothered with this. This is what's called a false equivalency. I wasn't comparing socialized medicine anywhere with the U.S. for-profit system. I was paraphrasing multiple doctors who were explaining publicly why there was a shortfall of equipment in the U.S. when the U.S. is such a rich country. And the answer is that for-profits have no motive to stockpile equipment that will be in use only for emergencies. The military, for example, isn't for-profit, so it can stockpile equipment that may only be used in very rare circumstances or never. For-profit models don't allow for that unless subsidized by the federal government, in which case they are really not pure for-profits. They are socialized. The point the doctors were making is that if U.S. medicine was a more socialized model, the U.S. would have more emergency supplies, including ventilators, ready in a national stockpile.

Do you mean like the European countries with their socialized medicine were all stocked up for the virus? Then why are countries like Italy and Spain letting old folks die without treatment?