OncomingStorm93

It's hard to believe it's already been (four days shy of) a month since the one hour when the NBA shut down, Tom Hanks got sick, and POTUS's oval office address. I said that night that I was cautiously optimistic for the first time in this crisis, at least in regards to how it would play out in America. I was optimistic because I believed that for the first time, everyone was awake and finally ready to protect themselves. It's clear that we are making good progress in America. New cases have stopped accelerating. Unfortunately, we're still seeing roughly 30,000 new cases a day, but a stagnant number is better than a rising number. Also unfortunately, deaths will continue to pile up, but the data does indicate that the mitigation measures have been working, and the curve is indeed being flattened. Will it stay that way? I hope, but who knows. This could have been a whole lot worse... it still can be, if we fail to stick the landing. But at the moment, new cases have stopped accelerating, and that's the first small step towards getting out of this nightmare.

I know that the impact of the virus on video game development and the new consoles has been a discussion point around here. The Last Of Us Part II just got delayed indefinitely, due to concerns about being able to physically distribute the game in May when it was set for release. I'm expecting several big games to get delayed, either because retail will still be closed, or because quarantine measures are hampering game development. I'd still be surprised if both the Xbox Series X and PS5 launch this holiday season.

I recommend you make a Twitter list compiling a dozen or two different journalists from across the political spectrum (but avoiding the extreme ends). That way you get a variety of reporting (and since it's Twitter, the message gets simplified into a couple sentences). From there, you can find the true middle of the story.

I don't think films will be held off because of continued social-distancing measures at theaters, for several reasons. First, I expect those measures to last much longer than the first month back in operation. I expect those measures to continue until the end of the next flu season, basically a year from right now. I'm not talking about all the social distancing measures currently in effect, just movie theaters. I think it will be like that for about half a year, not just to help prevent a second wave in the fall/winter, but to reassure paying customers that they are safe. It's that mental block that will be a bigger challenge then the health challenge. I don't expect distributors to hold off on releasing films until theaters return to allowing full capacity. At a certain point, you start losing value with a film that's sitting on your shelf awaiting release. Also, I don't think paying customers would be deterred by social-distancing in theaters. If they are, then they wouldn't see the film with a full audience, and probably weren't going to see the film anyway. It's making the best of a bad situation. Perhaps the biggest of the blockbusters wait until theaters are at full capacity, but something like A Quiet Place II doesn't need to. That film's audience will show up, even if some have to wait an extra week or two because of reduced capacity. And Mulan is damaged goods at this point, just release it as soon as theaters open. Much like "experts" thought Mulan would be the trial balloon for blockbuster releases in the day of coronavirus, I believe it will be the trial balloon for getting blockbuster releases back underway as soon as possible.

An excellent horror film can be made out of this. Not your 21st century jump-cut scares. Good ol' Hitchcockian horror. Build up the dread. The audience knows how the story will go, so use that to your advantage and twist the knife slowly. Scare people with the horrors of reality, about how horrible the world managed the situation. Not just the virus, but the societal effects. On another note, my guess right now is that the absolute earliest movie theaters could reopen right now is early August. That's assuming this peaks in late April/early May (I'm not sold on the idea this is peaking in two weeks), and really trails off in June. There will need to be a decent grace period to get operations rolling again, and get potential customers comfortable with the idea of going back to theaters. In fact, I imagine social distancing will still be enforced when theaters re-open for a good while.

I DARE him to do it. The optics would be brutally stunning.

WHO is covering for China. That's not a conspiracy. WHO hasn't cared to press China at all on it's numbers or measures taken. It's been nothing but praise. They won't dare call into question China's numbers. They won't even recognize Taiwan. WHO rep on an interview disconnected the call when asked about Taiwan. They waited until it was already across Europe and entering America to declare this officially a Pandemic. There's much more out there on this subject. WHO is not an innocent bystander in China's cover-up. EDIT: Also, this isn't a domestic political issue, before anyone takes it down that path.

I'm not sure why anyone would have believed the China government in the first place, given their overall history and political class, not to mention it was obvious by mid-January that the government worked early to silence any doctors who tried to warn the world about the pandemic. China tried to cover this up early, and when it became apparent they couldn't hide the virus from the world, they locked down major cities. That wasn't normal behavior. So I'm not sure why anyone believed China's numbers in the first place.

I'm calling it now: Dr. Fauci is TIME's Person of the Year.

I can assure you there is no ill will. There was nothing inflammatory or celebratory in pointing out the stark contrast that a month can create. I was going through the early pages of the thread, trying to get a feel for what the vibe was exactly a month ago (as March ends today), came across the first post, and remembered Madhuvan's more recent thoughts. It's just a reminder of how quickly things can change, and how vigilant everyone needs to be for what the next month holds.

What a difference exactly one month makes.

Hard disagree. It's clear 9/11 had a monumental lasting impact on the American psyche. It basically dictated the 2010s on a social level. People gradually became more distant and less trusting. It drove politics, and still does. Surveillance acts, partisan lines, wars fought and the military-industrial complex that grew. The 2008 global financial crash also had a large social impact. You saw Americans communally get fed up with the status quo, which allowed extreme right and left political movements to grab a foothold (remember the Tea Party? Remember Occupy Wall Street?). Those may have been short term movements, but they set the stage for the following decade of political hackery. The fallout from this crisis is going to be very extreme. There's not going to be a quick return to normalcy. Are we resilient? Yes, but a big component of resiliency is survival instincts, and our instincts as a society will be retrained by this event.

350k. I started at that figure, got away from it, then got back. Thought there was something wrong with the math in the middle. 20k a day average would be optimistic. We're at 20k today. There should be a solid 20k at least per day at next week, which alone gets us to 300,000. Either way, hospital systems in states with, lets say 4k-7k cases as of tonight, will be reach a breaking point at some point in the next 5-8 days, I believe.

This week is going to be a brutal slap of reality. We are reaching the point in America where the hospital systems in states far beyond New York become overwhelmed. A week ago the states had 44,000 cases. Tonight, almost four times that amount, 163,000. My guesstimate is, we should have at the very lease 350,000 cases next Monday. Up until now, the focus has been on New York, specifically NYC, but it's clear cases are accelerating in up to a dozen other states. My area, South Florida, is screwed because our governor considered Spring Break profits and toeing the party line more important. Beaches in many counties were opened and packed this weekend. It's worth repeating that our Surgeon General gave a statewide emergency notification to every living soul with a phone because DeSantis wouldn't step up to the plate. There's optimism to be found in Italy's declining numbers of new cases, but 4k cases a day is far closer to the peak than the valley. Lots of work left to do, deaths still piling up rapidly. No notable signs of improvement elsewhere.

Right now it's showing me 66.7k new cases reported. Yesterday 64.5k, day before that 60.8k So up roughly 10% from 2 days ago at the moment. Perhaps the info just got in. I imagine the data's being constantly updated.