46th President of the United States, Joe Biden
Discussion
76% of the public support it, 60% of republicans support it, but its not good enough for the GOP who are desperately trying every trick in the book to delay the relief bill in the hope they can turn public opinion against it.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/541541-gop-pul...
Trying to score points than represent the people who elected them. Their behaviour continues to be utterly abhorrent.
Wapo article on why Republican argument against HR1 doesn't stand up https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/04...
TL;DR Republicans don't want a level playing field, because it would disadvantage them.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/541541-gop-pul...
Trying to score points than represent the people who elected them. Their behaviour continues to be utterly abhorrent.
Wapo article on why Republican argument against HR1 doesn't stand up https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/04...
TL;DR Republicans don't want a level playing field, because it would disadvantage them.
Edited by Crafty_ on Thursday 4th March 19:39
Noodle1982 said:
Unaccompanied kids being held for an average of 77hrs, longer than the 72hrs permitted by US law.
www.cnn.com/cnn/2021/03/03/politics/immigration-us...
It's got to be serious if even CNN are saying how bad it is under Biden.
Does anyone know if Biden has addressed it over the last few days/weeks?......
Never mind - found it. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/03/politics/immigr...www.cnn.com/cnn/2021/03/03/politics/immigration-us...
It's got to be serious if even CNN are saying how bad it is under Biden.
Does anyone know if Biden has addressed it over the last few days/weeks?......
Has a pretty clear explanation for why it's happening - Covid restrictions causing delays and Biden is actually allowing children in, having reversed the previous administration's decision to simply turn them back. Also mentions that they're opening new temporary facilities to try to address the problem.
Any chance of a working link?
Edited by rscott on Thursday 4th March 19:37
gumshoe said:
HM-2 said:
gumshoe said:
So explain why you think Florida has performed worse than California?
Right now, Florida is performing significantly worse than California.For 3rd March, Florida had a roughly 50% more reported covid cases than California despite having a three fifths of the population.
Edited by HM-2 on Thursday 4th March 22:44
HM-2 said:
I posted the stats on the last page. California currently 199.5 cases per 100,000 citizens. Florida 253 per 100,000 citizens. Those figures for the last week IIRC.
For 3rd March, Florida had a roughly 50% more reported covid cases than California despite having a three fifths of the population.
Do you know what the death rate is between the two? Is Florida worse than California?For 3rd March, Florida had a roughly 50% more reported covid cases than California despite having a three fifths of the population.
Edited by HM-2 on Thursday 4th March 22:44
RonaldMcDonaldAteMyCat said:
o you know what the death rate is between the two? Is Florida worse than California?
Overall death rates are fairly similar. California marginally lower.Florida 144 deaths per 100,000
California 134 deaths per 100,000
Current 7 day average death rates are higher in Cali though. About double that of Florida, or circa 15% more per 100,000.
HM-2 said:
RonaldMcDonaldAteMyCat said:
o you know what the death rate is between the two? Is Florida worse than California?
Overall death rates are fairly similar. California marginally lower.Florida 144 deaths per 100,000
California 134 deaths per 100,000
Current 7 day average death rates are higher in Cali though. About double that of Florida, or circa 15% more per 100,000.
Byker28i said:
gumshoe said:
Florida's population grows annually through migration by around 1.5% of its population.
The annual deaths has been around 17% (or 15% adjusted for net migration/per capita) higher than the previous years. Basically no different or better when compared to states that had strict lockdowns.
Why don't you look at California. They had a 20% increase in deaths in 2020 compared to the year before. And California has net immigation, so per capita that looks even worse.
So why do you tihnk Florida isn't a good example of lockdown vs not lockdown?
What is their stats is worse than other states, per capita?
Cases rarely result in deaths. Deaths are the important figure to concern yourself with.
So explain why you think Florida has performed worse than California?
Some good questions. What the death rate vs infections? The annual deaths has been around 17% (or 15% adjusted for net migration/per capita) higher than the previous years. Basically no different or better when compared to states that had strict lockdowns.
Why don't you look at California. They had a 20% increase in deaths in 2020 compared to the year before. And California has net immigation, so per capita that looks even worse.
So why do you tihnk Florida isn't a good example of lockdown vs not lockdown?
What is their stats is worse than other states, per capita?
Cases rarely result in deaths. Deaths are the important figure to concern yourself with.
So explain why you think Florida has performed worse than California?
The US currently have 531,652 deaths for almost 30m infections. It stands to reason less infections would be less deaths, then each state/area has different population density, demographic (rich/poor) there's a lot of factors to consider, such as mobility, transport hubs, who opened up when and what the population acted like - it's not an easy thing to compare.
And again, we know the stats have been recorded differently in different areas, especially Florida, but it's still running as third worse state with cases on the rise again, 4th worse if you look at deaths, or about half way if you look at cases/deaths per 1m population
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/...
The top states in Florida are Miami, Broward (Fort Lauderdale etc), Palm Beach and Orange county (disney etc) - all holiday destinations that were opened up.
Whats the answer? I don't know, but we know it's transmitted through contact, so it stands to reason to take all the sensible precautions to minimise contact, clean surfaces/hands etc after contact. If thats takes a lockdown because people wont be sensible - well thats exactly where we are in the UK now after the relaxations last summer.
Stats fudged in florida...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/04/fl...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/12/florid...
https://time.com/5853398/florida-fired-scientist-c...
What is certain is that the US has moved from a leadership with a denial culture and blame everyone else, to one under Biden thats taking it seriously and putting plans into action.
Edited by Byker28i on Thursday 4th March 12:47
As I said before, the infection rate does not even start to provide a reasonable picture. The deaths are the most important thing to look at. There as been excess deaths across all states in the USA. This is without question. Most of these will have been due to covid.
The excess deaths in California, one of the most restrict lockdown states, has been worse per capita than Florida. This is evident from the statistics provided by the CDC. Now you may say Florida is fudging figures. That does not matter, because they cannot fudge deaths.
Even if a state under or over reports infections, all that does is alter their case fatality ratio. The excess deaths gives a much better picture. We know that a number of deaths have been erroneously attributed to covid (with a much, much less but still possible chance that the opposite is also true). This was always likely to happen due to the rather loose reporting/surveillance requirements for a covid death.
Which is why "How many people died more this year compared to last year" is the best question to ask. And with that, California had a much higher incident of deaths than Florida did.
So can those peddling the "Florida has done really badly" idea please explain how and on what comparative metrics Florida has done worse than California, for example.
Byker28i said:
The top states in Florida are Miami, Broward (Fort Lauderdale etc), Palm Beach and Orange county (disney etc) - all holiday destinations that were opened up.
I'm sure you know this and it was likely a mistype but those are not states. Fort Lauderdale is a city, Miami is a city in Miami Dade (which is a county), Palm Beach is a town and Broward is a county. Byker28i said:
And again, we know the stats have been recorded differently in different areas, especially Florida, but it's still running as third worse state with cases on the rise again, 4th worse if you look at deaths, or about half way if you look at cases/deaths per 1m population
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/...
That link serves to prove that Florida has done far better than many states that locked down, some of them with heavy restrictions.https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/...
The number of deaths (31,390) is not a good metric for comparison of performance. Why would anyone use that? The deaths per million is better. Florida has a relatively sizeable population, it stands to reason it will have more deaths than less populated states.
As I said before, look at the CDC data and the excess deaths. That's the best measure. It is far more difficult to fudge the number of people who died. And it's easier to establish a realistic averaged per capita deaths figure and compare that to 2020 deaths to work out the excess. Since there has been no other trigger event (bar perhaps say extra suicides, unattended medical emergencies and so on but I would posit they are small in relation to covid deaths) then you could realistically say covid is the cause of the excess deaths. On that measure, Florida has not done badly at all.
Sorry, I wrote States in stead of counties. I included the link to the data so you know exactly what information I was refering to and the numbers.
They are all counties and the top 4 are holiday/leisure destinations.
Again, and I've pointed this out twice with details and links, Florida fiddled the stats, so it's difficult to use them in comparisons
The virus is transmitted by contact. Minimising contact is of course the best measure prior to vacination
Edit: Currently the U.S. is now vaccinating an average of 2 million people a day, up from 1.3 million in early February.
That puts the U.S. on track to hit President Biden's goal of 100 million doses a month ahead of schedule.
It's a shame that trump had his vaccine quietly rather than promote it after being such a denier of the virus. There's still a significant number of republicans say they won't have the jab, it's Bill Gates injecting trackers etc.
They are all counties and the top 4 are holiday/leisure destinations.
Again, and I've pointed this out twice with details and links, Florida fiddled the stats, so it's difficult to use them in comparisons
The virus is transmitted by contact. Minimising contact is of course the best measure prior to vacination
Edit: Currently the U.S. is now vaccinating an average of 2 million people a day, up from 1.3 million in early February.
That puts the U.S. on track to hit President Biden's goal of 100 million doses a month ahead of schedule.
It's a shame that trump had his vaccine quietly rather than promote it after being such a denier of the virus. There's still a significant number of republicans say they won't have the jab, it's Bill Gates injecting trackers etc.
Edited by Byker28i on Friday 5th March 08:11
President Joe Biden called off an air strike against a second target in Syria last week after a woman and children were spotted in the area, a senior administration official told NBC News.
Because of the presence of civilians, only one target was bombed in last week's operation, which came in retaliation for recent rocket attacks on U.S. personnel that the Pentagon blamed on Iranian-backed Shiite militia in Iraq, the administration official and a Defense official said.
The president made the decision to cancel the separate air strike after military reconnaissance revealed a woman and two children in the courtyard of the intended target, according to the senior administration official.
The Biden administration sent a private message to Iran following the strike, the administration official said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/biden-called...
Because of the presence of civilians, only one target was bombed in last week's operation, which came in retaliation for recent rocket attacks on U.S. personnel that the Pentagon blamed on Iranian-backed Shiite militia in Iraq, the administration official and a Defense official said.
The president made the decision to cancel the separate air strike after military reconnaissance revealed a woman and two children in the courtyard of the intended target, according to the senior administration official.
The Biden administration sent a private message to Iran following the strike, the administration official said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/biden-called...
Speaking of fudged stats, more comes out about Cuomo... Pressures mounting on him
Aides to Andrew Cuomo rewrote a nursing home report in June 2020 to hide the high death toll, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times. The intervention came as Cuomo "was starting to write a book on his pandemic achievements."
Top aides to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo were alarmed: A report written by state health officials had just landed, and it included a count of how many nursing home residents in New York had died in the pandemic.
The number — more than 9,000 by that point in June — was not public, and the governor’s most senior aides wanted to keep it that way. They rewrote the report to take it out, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The extraordinary intervention, which came just as Mr. Cuomo was starting to write a book on his pandemic achievements, was the earliest act yet known in what critics have called a monthslong effort by the governor and his aides to obscure the full scope of nursing home deaths.
After the state attorney general revealed earlier this year that thousands of deaths of nursing home residents had been undercounted, Mr. Cuomo finally released the complete data, saying he had withheld it out of concern that the Trump administration might pursue a politically motivated inquiry into the state’s handling of the outbreak in nursing homes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/nyregion/cuomo-...
Aides to Andrew Cuomo rewrote a nursing home report in June 2020 to hide the high death toll, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times. The intervention came as Cuomo "was starting to write a book on his pandemic achievements."
Top aides to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo were alarmed: A report written by state health officials had just landed, and it included a count of how many nursing home residents in New York had died in the pandemic.
The number — more than 9,000 by that point in June — was not public, and the governor’s most senior aides wanted to keep it that way. They rewrote the report to take it out, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The extraordinary intervention, which came just as Mr. Cuomo was starting to write a book on his pandemic achievements, was the earliest act yet known in what critics have called a monthslong effort by the governor and his aides to obscure the full scope of nursing home deaths.
After the state attorney general revealed earlier this year that thousands of deaths of nursing home residents had been undercounted, Mr. Cuomo finally released the complete data, saying he had withheld it out of concern that the Trump administration might pursue a politically motivated inquiry into the state’s handling of the outbreak in nursing homes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/nyregion/cuomo-...
gumshoe said:
As I said before, look at the CDC data and the excess deaths.
So I'm doing exactly that right now.I've taken the data sets here, stripped out all weeks that don't show excess death rates, removed the extraneous repeated data sets to concentrate only on the unweighted all-cause data, and averaged the low and high excess. Probably not the most rigorous methodology but it will do in a pinch.
Firstly, a caveat- there are 45 weeks of data meeting these criteria for California and 44 for Florida.
The population of Florida is 21.48 million, and their total excess death toll as an average of low and high excess from the 4th April 2020 until 30th January 2021 was 30,859. That's approximately 143.7 excess deaths per 100,000 citizens in that timeframe.
The population of California is 39.51 million, and their total excess death toll as an average of low and high excess from the 28th March 2020 until 30th January 2021 was 59,581. That's approximately 150.8 excess deaths per 100,000 citizens in that timeframe.
However, this is one significant event that's largely ignored by this analysis- the California wildfires which burned between May and December 2020. In addition to the 31 direct deaths that came about as a result of these, academic studies point to thousands of indirect excess deaths during the most serious period of ~40 days between August and September alone. Now some of those deaths are themselves likely to be Covid-adjacent, but it does serve to highlight the obvious issues in comparing excess deaths without giving proper consideration to other contributing factors.
Senate are set for a busy weekend,
Ron Johnson has forced the reading of the entire stimulus bill, all 628 pages. The Senate emptied out as soon as the reading started, but a Republican must be present on the floor, so Johnson stayed, pacing around.
After the reading Republicans then have the chance to raise an unlimited number of amendments. Johnson is organising a 3 shift rota to drag the process out as long as possible. There is no point to this, as democrats are well aligned to pass the bill.
Just pettiness basically and why the Senate needs some rule reform.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/04/senate-bi...
Ron Johnson has forced the reading of the entire stimulus bill, all 628 pages. The Senate emptied out as soon as the reading started, but a Republican must be present on the floor, so Johnson stayed, pacing around.
After the reading Republicans then have the chance to raise an unlimited number of amendments. Johnson is organising a 3 shift rota to drag the process out as long as possible. There is no point to this, as democrats are well aligned to pass the bill.
Just pettiness basically and why the Senate needs some rule reform.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/04/senate-bi...
I think what the data shows across the globe is that when the virus has become endemic, lockdown and increased lockdown severity has not resulted in a significant reduction in overall death rate.
In this respect, Trump's approach was probably, inadvertantly, the right one; keep the economy going because you're going to get the deaths anyway.
It's a failing across the Western world that we haven't been able to coordinate or properly test different approaches, other than incidentally.
In this respect, Trump's approach was probably, inadvertantly, the right one; keep the economy going because you're going to get the deaths anyway.
It's a failing across the Western world that we haven't been able to coordinate or properly test different approaches, other than incidentally.
Edited by anonymous-user on Friday 5th March 10:00
Crafty_ said:
Just pettiness basically and why the Senate needs some rule reform.
The people who voted for the Republicans expect them to do their job. If the stimulus bill is being used not only for stimulus, but also other spending that is more politically potent, it's only right it gets scrutiny. Isn't the point of any democratic policital forum that measures are examined and negotiated before they enacted?Byker28i said:
Sorry, I wrote States in stead of counties. I included the link to the data so you know exactly what information I was refering to and the numbers.
They are all counties and the top 4 are holiday/leisure destinations.
Again, and I've pointed this out twice with details and links, Florida fiddled the stats, so it's difficult to use them in comparisons
The virus is transmitted by contact. Minimising contact is of course the best measure prior to vacination
Edit: Currently the U.S. is now vaccinating an average of 2 million people a day, up from 1.3 million in early February.
That puts the U.S. on track to hit President Biden's goal of 100 million doses a month ahead of schedule.
It's a shame that trump had his vaccine quietly rather than promote it after being such a denier of the virus. There's still a significant number of republicans say they won't have the jab, it's Bill Gates injecting trackers etc.
Again you are wrong; they are not all counties. I'll leave you to look into this for yourself, I already posted their actual status for each one. I don't know where you obtain your information from, but it isn't correct.They are all counties and the top 4 are holiday/leisure destinations.
Again, and I've pointed this out twice with details and links, Florida fiddled the stats, so it's difficult to use them in comparisons
The virus is transmitted by contact. Minimising contact is of course the best measure prior to vacination
Edit: Currently the U.S. is now vaccinating an average of 2 million people a day, up from 1.3 million in early February.
That puts the U.S. on track to hit President Biden's goal of 100 million doses a month ahead of schedule.
It's a shame that trump had his vaccine quietly rather than promote it after being such a denier of the virus. There's still a significant number of republicans say they won't have the jab, it's Bill Gates injecting trackers etc.
Edited by Byker28i on Friday 5th March 08:11
And again revisit what I wrote above. The relevant figures are excess deaths. Infections in themselves do not provide much colour certainly where there is so much scope to fudge the figures (both up and down).
Byker28i said:
The virus is transmitted by contact. Minimising contact is of course the best measure prior to vacination
Can you explain then why, on a per capita basis, Florida has fared so well compared to so many states. And especially so against the likes of California who have had very strict lockdown rules?If the best course of action was to lock down strictly (i.e. absolute minimal contact regardless of context, safety measures and efficacy) then why have those states that did, perform so badly?
Why has Florida managed, despite a heavily aged population, which is the number one common trait amongst fatalities, fared well?
You keep returning to emotive comments about Biden. We're discussing statistics on the performance of lockdown. The vaccination effort is a separate subject and whilst impressive that the USA is inoculating at a rapid pace, it is not pertinent to this particular exchange.
The UK has already indicated that vaccine or not, there will continue to be lockdown's during the year (and years to come). I do not know individual US states' stance on that, but living and operating in a state of limbo, when the evidence suggests it does not really help much if at all, is not a "good thing".
Florida did the right thing. It's residents will be far better off for it.
https://www.lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-news-from-LSE/20...
RonaldMcDonaldAteMyCat said:
I think what the data shows across the globe is that when the virus has become endemic, lockdown and increased lockdown severity has not resulted in a significant reduction in overall death rate.
That's because lockdowns are typically instituted in response to endemic spread and elevated death rates. Hence "flattening the curve".RonaldMcDonaldAteMyCat said:
The people who voted for the Republicans expect them to do their job. If the stimulus bill is being used not only for stimulus, but also other spending that is more politically potent, it's only right it gets scrutiny. Isn't the point of any democratic policital forum that measures are examined and negotiated before they enacted?
Johnson has absolutely no intention of a sensible debate, he's just using every technicality he can find to delay the inevitable.From the article:Article said:
"Historically what’s happened is ... we offer a couple of hundred amendments on the Republican side," Johnson said. "And we get a couple of dozen voted on, and people tire out. I’m coming up with a process that keeps people from tiring out. I’m getting sign-ups. I’m laying out a three-shift schedule."
Does that sound like someone who wants a reasoned debate ? or is just trying to be awkward for the sake of it ?Gassing Station | News, Politics & Economics | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff