So, did the heavy lockdown states end up doing better than the free states?
 

Did the predictions of the COVID “mass murderer” Neanderthal governors of states like Texas, Florida, South Dakota, etc. end up coming true, and the governors of states like California, New York, Michigan turn out to be life saving heroes with the massive lockdowns?
I don’t follow any of these things anymore. So IDK.

And I predict you won't be following this thread for long in PPOT.

_

Well I’d say calling certain Governors “Neanderthals” pretty much sums up what you want this thread to prove to you.

Way to not be biased for not knowing anything, as you said.

Well MI was #1 in draconian lockdown measures and is now #1 in new infections.

Might be an anomaly, though.

Either way, Fraü Whitmer appears to be very reluctant to re-impose her benevolent fascism. My guess is she has begun her reelection campaign so is once again hiding her megalomaniacal self.

It’s The Neanderthals v. The Dictators.
So we’re even.

It just might be a case of failing the Marshmallow Test.

April 13th 2021
Oh, Canada, you failed the marshmallow test
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2021/04/13/opinion/canada-failing-covid-19-marshmallow-test
We can have all the laws on the book we want, but if people don't follow them, not only do we not get a second marshmallow, we might get Covid-19 and die.

I found this information below on actual compliance with Covid-19 precautions including lock-downs, the whole USA gets a failing grade, except the state of Vermont.

https://www.unacast.com/covid19/social-distancing-scoreboard
In the past there has been some discussion on how some states report their statistics verses others, and how when the data gets imputed into the system it may create an artificial dip and or peak/spike. The latest article I found on it was out of date, but showed a lot of differences. I'm not sure if a national standard is being followed, if not then it's an apples to oranges comparison.

That’s racist.

Crows understand the marshmallow test.

‘Dictators’ is descriptive. ‘Neanderthals’ is insulting.

I think he was using the words of someone else that painted a very bleak picture for what would happen in those states.

The projections they made, the many Brazillions of dead and injured, etc....
How does hindsight compare to those predictions that those using that word made.

And secondly, maybe Neanderthals were the smart ones.
So much about Neadnerthals has been revised time and time again.
My mom was a teacher, s I've been able to read multi-decades of materials on the same subject to see how a wrong view point is taught, replaced with another wrong viewpoint, then information came out that made that wrong view piont have to go, and another wrong view point took its place, repeat, repeat....

We know a lot less than we try to seem.

Kind of like the 911 bubble bursting, the pandemic was never really wide scale in scope.

Got it Mclovin.

I have no clue what the data says, but would be curious to see a neutral parties take as well. Unfortunately I do not even know if that is possible anymore.

I signed up for her recall on Change org.
The account collected all the required signatures to go forward with the next phase.
Then they nullified votes and/or changed the recall rules.

So perhaps the entire thing was just to collect a domestic enemy list or something like that.
I couldn't care less about being on one.
It will make it easier to choose who not to do business with.

Change org then started spamming me for all sorts of unrelated liberal causes.

Which is funny, since there's plenty of folks here in Texas that were pissed off about the restrictions that we had. We had periods of mandatory masking. As far as I know, it wasn't enforced and there were some people that ignored it, and most stores ignored it if a customer was ignoring it.

But, in my experience, most folks followed the rules.

The problem is that it's tough to compare states directly.

For instance, I don't think you can compare CA to ND. I also don't think that you can compare MA to NE. How about NY to TX, nope, probably not a good comparison.

Comparing based on population, nope, that's no good, because what if the population is very spread out in one state and stacked on top of each other in the other. How about size, nope, because then you could have radically different populations.

The best comparison would probably be population density, but even then, you'd need a way to scale it. If CA has the most folks and is one of the biggest states, that's great, but what if only 1/3 of the state has a ton of population and the rest is mostly wilderness. Then 90% of the people would be in a very different population density situation to the state figured as a whole.

no, for the test to meet the current situation the researcher would have to take away a bag of marshmallows the child already owned. then promise to give a marshmallow back every fifteen minutes if the child did some meaningless and humiliating task.

and then never gave back the marshmallows.

an interesting way to identify the most obedient and gullible members of society.

Great point. Any time I see differing opinions on history that wasn't directly witnessed, and one "expert" says "that's not possible" or "that didn't/couldn't have happened," I always think "what a horrible scientist."

Any "fact" about the distant past that was not directly observed or recorded should be presented as "our best theory" rather than being presented as fact.

i mean the projections by experts were largely spot on. had we continued with the lock down, the experts predicted that we'd have about 300k dead, and if we didn't shut anything down, or do anything at all, we'd have about 2 million dead.

by and and large america did some things, and wow, would you look at that, we are gonna end up with around 600k and change dead by the time its done. assuming a variant doesn't keep the whole thing going, which is a possibility. but you know what, the mixed measures we did adopt, probably saved about a million lives, and we probably could have saved another quarter of a million lives staying in hard lock down. thats what the modelers predicted, and thats basically exactly what happened.


the only projections that failed were those by non experts. remember when trump and pence said that covid deaths would go to zero by may 2020? because they knew jack all nothing about what they were doing, fitted a cubic function in MS excel and decided that since that graph went to zero by may, that deaths would certainly go to zero by may 2020?

https://www.vox.com/2020/5/8/21250641/kevin-hassett-cubic-model-smoothing

I agree - I'm interested in seeing the results once all states are opened up - then we can see if some states have more or less of an on-going problem. One scenario might be that the more restrictive states can open and stay open, whereas the less restrictive states may see more variants and have a continuing issue with Covid appearing here and there.

For my area around Seattle, I see us having an issue with our international airport continuing to bring in people from more infected areas / countries, making any comparisons with other cities or states difficult.

its probably better to compare covid19 measures by country, seeing as how inter mixing of the states and no travel ban kinda created a patchwork in the USA that turned kinda into a average, rather that distinct chunks.

norway and sweeden, very similar countries in demographics, weather, social order, healthcare systems, etc but very different approaches to covid19, and lets take a look.

Sweden:
population: 10 million
Cases: 892k
deaths: 13.7k

Norway:
Population: 5 million
Cases: 105k
Deaths: 707. not 707 thousand, 707 total

so even adjusted for population, norway was about 4-5x better place to be during covid than sweden. largely due to norways early and much more effective lockdowns compared to sweden.

Michigan (and Ontario) have extremely high numbers of the UK variant, and increasing cases of at least two other more dangerous variants.

It's not a level playing field right now, if the variant(s) spread to the remainder of the states before vaccination is complete you will see some serious increase in daily cases.

Oregon's governor has done a very good job. Our rates are in the bottom 5 last I checked.

Not perfect. In fact, not even close to perfect. And, I am generally NOT a fan of Kate Brown.

But, she does understand the marshmellow theory.

Is that because Oregon did a good job, or because Oregon doesn't have many people, and the people that it does have are spread out across a large state?

Oregon has less than half the population of Washington, and <1/12 of the population of California. Oregon is also actually quite a bit bigger than Washington, so less than half the population in a space that's 38% larger than Washington.

My vote is that it had less to do with the actions of the govt, and more to do with characteristics of the state and its population.

Oregon is #39 in the list of states by population density. So, bottom 5% may not be bad.

Sort of.

First. Washington went NUTS early on. We all saw that. And I think we reacted in a very prudent manner. COVID was rampant in Seattle in March 2020. I know lots who had it.

So we cracked down.

But, there is a lot of low density land in Oregon. (Which is also highly populated by reactionary rednecks.) So, compliance in the rural areas was about what you would find in Idaho, Montana, and similar. It was the crack downs in the populated areas that kept things from getting nuts.

Odd story, the first COVID case in Oregon was an employee at the school my kids attended. I know people who visited him in the hospital. Small world...

Neanderthals are a species of humans just different but were able to mix with homo sapiens and reproduce.....so using Neanderthals as a pejorative is technically Racist. Just sayin'

LWJ: "But, there is a lot of low density land in Oregon. (Which is also highly populated by reactionary rednecks.) So, compliance in the rural areas was about what you would find in Idaho, Montana, and similar. It was the crack downs in the populated areas that kept things from getting nuts."

I live near and grew up in a town full of those "reactionary rednecks" mentioned earlier..I consider them pretty good people. I get along with most of them them just fine. The non criminals, that is.

But maybe you're right...Antifa thugs know better than to attack small towns..

They "demonstrated" very peacefully down in K falls when they encountered armed citizens standing shoulder to shoulder in front of the main street storefronts. Not one window smashed, no fires, no frozen water bottles tossed.

My daughter lives in South Dakota...the only state that never locked down or required masks. Probably lots of "reactionary rednecks" there as well.

I can’t say for sure because here in Georgia which was one of the first states to reopen way back after the first wave of COVID in March/April we were all supposed to have died long before now according to CNN/MSNBC/NBC/CBS/ABS/PBS/NPR/NY Times/Washington Post and I am sure 10 others that I am missing or don’t even know exist. Yes the case counts have ebbed and flowed here as they have in most every other state, the data show since Jan 1 2021 cases have dropped off a cliff and thankfully have stayed that way despite our states lack luster vaccination rate. I think reasons why are multifaceted including that we did open back up in a limited capacity early on. People had an outlet of some sort, people by and large if given the correct information will make the decision that is best for them in a given situation, we may have reached a heard immunity sooner as a result of opening. I said this what seems like a very long time ago now in this COVID age, we did this all wrong. In a pandemic you isolate the sick people not the whole population, the whole country did not go on lock down for the Spanish flu.

Bingo! Especially loved your bit about people able to make their own decisions. The government should inform...give the right information. Sadly, not all politicians think that way.

One of the earliest problems is governments were misinforming.

CV19 is something most people would not even be aware about if it weren't for the news.
If not this virus, some other virus could get the same people in the same year.

Straight up, people do not think about the scale of how many can be injured or die do to a rare cause in a country of hundreds of millions. Our sense of scale of a problem gets blown when talking in absolutes for a country, compared to say, a village.

If you took the 2020 CV19 deaths and round up to 400,000, take the survival rate, and calculate the number of deaths per survivor into a number of villages per death you'd get a grasp on CV19.
Then look at the change of overall deathrate per village from pre CV19.
For the greater portion of villages. that difference would have to be zere, there wouldn't be enough village to go around.

Imagine as village elder:

Twenty villagers will die in the next three years from cancer or heart problems due to lack of timely diagnosis and treatment caused by panic induced actions over CV19.
These twenty deaths are in order to stave off a chance that one villager might die from CV19 in the next year.

As village elder, what would you do?
How does that play out?

I suspect what he was talking about had nothing to do with rioting, looting, etc..., and was more about folks saying "F that! You can't tell me what to do. I ain't wearin' no damn mask!"

Using the term "reactionary redneck" was certainly a bit caustic, and bound to irritate some folks, so I understand where you're coming from.

Rednecks, country folks, etc... in many cases are very polite, hospitable, generous folks. I also worked in a poor ethnic part of Tampa once. Many white folks would probably have been uncomfortable in the area. Most of the folks that came into the store where I worked were some of the nicest most polite folks of any of the stores where I ever worked.

But, I have no doubt that if you rub any of those folks the wrong way, you may be surprised by how they can change. And I'm not commenting/judging on if the change/reaction is right or not, just an observation.

i love how everyone just glossed over the actual data and has kept just spouting opinions like they mattered.

lol.

I was in Bend, Oregon last summer and very few people were wearing masks, even in a large grocery store. Then, in Coos Bay, I went into a casino and not one person was wearing a mask in a crowded room of slot machines. Yet Oregon has always been doing well. I'm not sure the Gov had anything to do with it, based on what I saw.

seeing how the OP is asking about comparisons between STATES and not COUNTRIES, your data is irrelevant to the thread, despite your OPINION that it matters.

Id trust a Neanderthal over a liberal dictator any day of the week.

as my post details, state by state is not really a very useful comparison in this case if you are interested in how effective lockdown and masking measures were. the USA didnt put travel bans in place and the country became a strange patchwork of different measures required in different places at different times, but everyone is free to travel between all of them, so the data is very mixed up.

if you want clear data showing the effects of masking and lockdowns, it exists, just not in the USA.

so, do you want know what the effects were/are, or do you just wanna complain about your state government? i thought we were interested in the former, i guess maybe you are interested in the later. because the data is very clear, widespread masking, high test rates, contact tracing, social distancing, and lockdown were very effective at slowing the spread of covid19.

Thank you for the link and the contextual information, I found it helpful.

It was a good post, kind of got buried in the "my opinion is fact" crowd's rant.

Hey, we've got feelings, just listen to my feelings.

Not sure how best to quantify "lockdown states" vs others but a lot of people want to make that a political thing so let's reinterpret "heavy lockdown state" as "blue state". There is solid data available on cases per state, so pretty easy to get the rankings of states by cases per 100k residents.

TL;DR of the 20 states hit hardest 14 (70%) are red, and of the 20 states who did the best 14 (70%) are blue.

ND
SD
RI
UT
TN
AZ
IA
OK
NE
WI
AR
SC
NJ
AL
KS
IN
MS
ID
DE
IL
GA
NV
MT
WY
FL
NY
TX
KY
MN
LA
MO
NM
MA
CT
CA
NC
OH
AK
MI
PA
CO
WV
VA
MD
NH
WA
ME
OR
VT
HI

Using solely that logic Tishabet, Turkmanistan's government "did the best" compared to any US state.
A direct problem with comparing cases per 100K is it might just show who was better at testing for positives per capita instead of who had a lesser percentage of CV19 cases per capita.
If a state banned testing, banned masks, banned mention of CV19, they'd top the charts for best CV19 response by data.

North Dakota and South Dakota is a far better comparison. One was locked down, one wasn't. No difference in outcome.