In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.
I can't speak for Texas but I had a case of appendicitis in the family last year and the main reason for delays wasn't the number of people in the hospital but the new procedures in place.
The hospital was nearly empty except for COVID patients and life threatning emergencies. We cancelled 1 million doctor appointments and 300k surgeries in 2020 (in a 10 million population).
That figure alone is mind-bending and it's odd so many people have difficulty ingesting it.
When you have a 'highly contagious disease that kills people with compromised immune systems' (aka the sick and recovering, aka most people in hospitals) - the healthcare system is going to be materially degraded.
Each one of those 300 000 surgeries has an impact on someone's life that's not accounted for in the cost of COVID. And that's only for 10M people, it'd be almost 12M surgeries for the US overall if that ratio held.
And that's only one of the many disruptions.
After all of this has happened, it's really odd to see so many who can't seem to internalize the scope of all of this.
Arguably society is in the process of crumbling now. Jan 6th was part of that, as were the BLM protests, the anti-vax protests, the contentious school-board meetings, the constant tug-of-war between Federal/state/local/individual authorities, high inflation, supply shortages, people refusing to go back to work, etc.
The tug-of-war between different levels of government is healthy. We should be worried when people stop tugging because they are afraid.
The Federal Reserve System and the US Government can bring inflation down to acceptable levels. They will do it after the pandemic. Supply shortages are to be expected given the ongoing disruption to workforces around the world.
Some protests produce important progress for society. I think that most of the BLM protests did that.
USA is handling the pandemic quite well. Given the country's diversity and massive economic inequality, things worked out better than I expected. Most at-risk folks got vaccinated before the Delta variant hit.
The only troubling development is that a large portion of the U.S. population (including some of my family members) showed that they believe that democracy is not important for our country. Specifically, they continue to support politicians who acted against U.S. democracy. I think that most of these people are simply gullible. Many of them are recently-retired and increased their consumption of media. The media companies deftly manipulate them by triggering fear and turning it to anger. Fortunately, these folks still believe that courts are important and they trust the military. They vote, but don't fight. Things will calm down over the next 10 years as the population-age curve flattens.
Therefore, society is not crumbling. Laws can and will be changed. Society will progress. USA and our entire species have a bright future.
The only troubling development is that a large portion of the U.S. population (including some of my family members) showed that they believe that democracy is not important for our country.
Can you clarify who and what? My most recent memory of tyranny-esque statements was the President of "the free world" dismissing freedom.
Note: I'm not taking political sides. I don't trust either color. But this idea that it's the Reds who are naive is, in the context of the current admin, biased and unfair.
147 US Senators and Representatives voted to throw out votes for US President from two states [0, 1]. 8 senators and 59 representatives lied to congress in writing [2]. The outgoing president lied to everyone saying that the election was stolen.
> I don't trust either color. But this idea that it's the Reds who are naive is, in the context of the current admin, biased and unfair.
My idea is based on my experiences with some of my "red" relatives. Examples:
1. One elderly relative refused the covid vaccine. The reasons they told me include: fear of side-effects, anger about "they're requiring vaccination for everything", and an intention to take hydroxycholorquine and ivermectin as treatments if they become infected. They also claimed that their doctor told them to wait on getting the vaccine "until we have more data on its safety". (Their doctor did not tell them this.)
2. Another elderly relative watches Fox News every day. Half a year after the election, they believed that the outgoing President won re-election and will take office soon.
3. A middle-aged relative believed that masks do not reduce covid transmission. I anticipated the December wave [3] and sent them masks to use during their Thanksgiving holiday travel. They did not use the masks. A few weeks later, their entire family got covid. They all recovered.
Again. You're only showing half the story. For example, where is the link to the Snowden revelations?
The red v blue paradigm is bogus. It's dated. It's a ruse. The Powerful v the powerless is far more accurate.
Just days ago - well timed just prior to 9/11 - the Leader of The Free World announced that freedom was irrelevant. And all the watchers of CNN and MSNBC were silent.
Please don't confuse megalomaniac with tyrant. They are not synonyms. We are every closer to The State being even more powerful. Politeness and narrative doesn't make actions any less acceptable.
I have to confess I was never seriously worried that Viking Hat Man was going to overthrow the government and declare himself Shaman-in-Chief, even while I watched that shocking footage live.
But I do think it’s quite possible that Pence would have been killed. Or that we would have a (however minor) constitutional crisis if congress certified an election contrary to the states under duress
Or just think of what would have happened if those quick thinking staffers didn't grab the Electoral College ballots as Congress ran for their lives to the shelter.
It only starts as a 'minor' constitutional crisis.
Trump can take to the streets and declare himself president for the next term because the election results were not validated.
He can challenge the 'never used' legal procedures in court and of course have his lawyers lie about it in public.
They could fire up enough people and get enough momentum so that a few Republicans could be pressured to not vote to validate the election results.
If he refused to physically leave the White House - who would make him leave? Imagine if he invited his supporters to 'come to Washington to Defend the President' and they set up camp by the thousands around the WH. And they'd be armed. Is the National Guard going to start shooting? The longer Trump stays there, the more entrenched his legitimacy.
Especially if there is violence, it'd really flare tensions.
If people believe that the election was stolen, they'd also be hard pressed to be told what the actual, legal procedures are for dealing with a failed vote validation, and so it would be a matter of populism as much as legality.
That's how coups happen: enough political, populist, physical force to carry the momentum beyond established legal norms.
There's no nice way to say this, but you watch too much TV. If you want to know how coup d'etat actually works Luttwak wrote a nice handbook[1]. Needless to say none of those conditions held on January 6th 2021.
There's no nice way to say this, but the implied definition of a coup from the reference you gave (i.e. generals take over the capitol) is only a very specific form of a coup, and to suggest that political manoeuvring and populist tactics don't form the basis of a coup, is completely wrong.
Mussolini's coup, 'March On Rome' [1] is a good reference, but there are plenty of historical examples.
Needless to say, the conditions on Jan 6. parallel key elements many historical coups.
" The highest-ranking U.S. officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, and other top military leaders made informal plans to stop a coup by former President Donald Trump and his allies in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election," [2]
(there are many sources for this).
So first, you're at odds with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who likely has an inkling of what was a 'coup' is.
Fabricating a constitutional crisis and fomenting mass populist furor is definitely a path to a coup, which he was obviously pursuing.
The reason that the VP et. al. reconvened immediately after the Jan 6 riots, directly in the 'still dangerous' aftermath - was because they wanted to make sure that the proceedings were as legitimate as possible, with little deviation from historic and traditional norms thereby minimizing the ability of the former President to create false narrative about it, and reducing his ability to sneak procedural and legal barbs into the process, which is defined by some really vague old laws and is established by tradition and precedent as much as anything.
Here are some good historical references, they make for good comparisons [3][4].
I think the chances of him fully taking over were small, but the chances of him mangling up processes and creating a kind of an oddball legal situation which would take many months to resolve while his supporters increased their level of agitation (we saw millions in the streets for BLM, no reason to believe his supporters mightn't have done the same) as a very real possibility.
