Very interesting, but I think you're probably right given how congress tend to be nowadays. If they saw fit to do it, then I wouldn't complain as there would go the student loan, finally. Thanks for providing that link.

note that that 2000 dollars a month bill is just a proposal now.  That would undoubtadily be a much better solution than the current check.

I've been following all the briefings since they started and have seen where some reporters really tried to make it look like Trump dropped the ball. Actually, he didn't because, if you remember, it was quite early on when he began putting travel restrictions in place. As a result of action like that we have between 45,000 and 50,000 dead. If he hadn't done what he did when he did it, then I believe he is right to say that we could have been facing many, many more deaths. No death is good, but I'd rather the smaller number then what we might have had if he'd delayed further with those restrictions on travel to, and from, the United States. Now, I know some of you do not support our president, and I respect that as it is your right and you have the freedom to your opinion. Just to be clear, I am not looking for a drawn out debate over that issue. I've been there before on another forum, and it got really nasty. Let's not do that here if at all possible. I think we can all agree on the fact that it'll be great once this mess is over and done with.

@82
Please, please become informed.  Trump literally suggested that maybe we can treat Covid with bleach on live TV.  Just perhaps that's a sign that when a lot of us say that he didn't take this seriously maybe you should listen, because the kind of person who can suggest maybe we should try treating it with bleach on live TV is the kind of person who wouldn't take it seriously.  There was a hell of a lot that Trump could have personally done this time, things like making sure we had face masks, and he did none of it.  Congress couldn't have stopped him, in fact congress would have applauded him, and he still did none of it.  It's not like you can say that there was no law put in front of him: he has the power to mobilize the army, to order factories to produce the things we need in an emergency, etc. all without involving congress.  And.  Nothing.  In fact if you watch the news you can even see the week or so where he went from downplaying it to realizing that actually this is a problem and he should have been preparing instead.

So yes, the lockdowns are his fault.  So is the stock market crash.  And this time it's actually *his* fault.  Personally his fault.

But honestly you lose a lot of points in my eyes, and probably in the eyes of many others, if you are blind and supporting Trump.  That's seriously voting directly against your best interest in a myriad of demonstrable ways.  I'd argue with you, but you don't seem to be arguing in good faith, so meh.  I'll just be disappointed that there's yet another person who can think positive things about someone who calls an entire nationality rapists and criminals to win an election, I guess.

my personal opinion on this one, and don't get mad at me, my health first, then, money second.

@87
Interesting; I'm white, and the last 6 or 7 times I've traveled they've done the hand swabbing thing to me as well, as well as everyone else in the line.  I take your points and agree with them (indeed I have had two Asian friends with similar concerns at one point or another) but it surprises me that people don't know this is a thing now because I thought it was standard everywhere.

If you want extra airport fun, though, get routed through Washington DC in 2002 or so with your blind brother, you're both kids, and the only adult is mom.  That was quite the experience. No one involved knew what to do about the two blind kids in the slightest because mom can't help us through, o no.

But the worst part about the airport thing is that people have smuggled fake bombs and other stuff through anyway to test security and TSA doesn't actually stop it.  So in exchange for the hell on earth that is airline security in the U.S., we get basically nothing. Yay!

@88 and @89: interesting! I guess things are finally changing once people caught on. Most of the non-Muslims I know though didn't know about the swabbing and were shocked when I told them it's happened to me 100% of the time over the last three years. It's a small sample size and I do acknowledge that, but I'm hard-pressed to believe in coincidences on this one given the propaganda to keep support for the war effort overseas strong here in the US.

@88: LOL, that must have been a circus.

Huh, experts aren't spreading doom and gloom for the sake of doom and gloom. Experts are suggesting that there's doom and gloom if we collectively screw up as a nation on this. Their point is to try to limit the spread of the virus so it can go away, reduce strain on hospitals, and maybe suggest ways to ease the burden on Americans while Kovid sadly stares at the empty roads as it withers away. The alternative is experts determining the number of deaths inbound from everyone being out and how hospitals can best determine on who take in and who to let die, also known as the Italy way of things.

   The fact we already have a real world example of a country reaching the worst possible case "during" a quarantine should already explain why we need to take things seriously. The United State's health care system cannot support a concurrent caseload heading over a million if this gets out of hand. And people need hospitals for way mor than just Kovid 19. The last thing we need is to reach a situation where hospitals are trying to determine what people to turn away and let die.

   Also yes, the fact we reached lockdown mode is a bit of a condemnation of the current president, who is given special powers to invoke action without Congress' approval in this situation. He literally had unlimited power and, has, not really done anything with it. He put up a travel ban, but so what? Other countries have done that, and done much more. He's been glacially slow to use his ability to direct production to expand the number of masks and other health necessities to better guard his citizens. Congress literally has no input, it's all Trump's responsibility. And as expected, when he has no one to hide behind to both handle the situation and blame when things go wrong, he does what is expected considering his many past bankruptcy failures when taking the lead on business projects. That being awful. In fact, despite a lot of powers being laid at his feet, he's mostly focusing on pointing his finger at governors, and governmental agencies for failing to stop the deaths, despite lacking his vastly expanded authority.

   ...There's a reason why the board of directors literally gave Trump an executive position with little or no power outside of branding in his own company at one point. When he's responsible for decision making, things fail, hard. Now, we went from business decisions to health decisions of a country, and he's equally as bad.

@93 those two links seem to be broken.

I have watched the video in it's entirety in order to say that I argue fairly and he gets a lot of basic things wrong because he's too angry.

The U.S. is already over 60000 deaths.  His point about that is wrong: the models are a range, that's the lower end.  The media may be reporting them sensationally, but the people producing them are doing responsible science and not throwing bullshit numbers around for the hell of it, and we are already beyond the lower end of that model and still going.

No one is proposing that we stay under lockdown until there's a vaccine.  No one ever has been.  The only point of the lockdown is to get to the point where the hospitals aren't going to be overloaded, and it looks like we are fortunately almost there.

The initial point of the lockdowns in China were in fact to try to get rid of Covid forever.  That has worked before.  Until it left China there was every chance that we would have been able to kill it permanently.

Immunocompromised people can take vaccines.  Not all of them, but as an immunocompromised person who is specifically told that I had better get a flu shot every year and has heard that from every doctor I've ever had, yeah, we can.  If you're immunocompromised to a  really severe degree that may not be true, but it is true for some of us.

Chloroquine might be effective against Covid, but it has lots and lots of side effects and the studies on it are, as far as I'm aware, inconclusive and contradictory.

Going for herd immunity was tried by Sweden.  Sweden is now beginning to have the problems that everyone warned would happen if lockdowns weren't done.  Also going for herd immunity stresses the hospitals to the breaking point, ergo no hospitals if you do that.

Most places with lockdowns (possibly all of them) still allow you to go out in the sun.  You can go for a walk, you can often still go to the park.  You have to observe social distancing but it's not like you're literally locked in your house like a jail cell.

How long you are immune from covid is being questioned currently.  If you get it once, you might be able to get it again.  We don't know if you're immune for months, years, or forever.  So "yeah I got covid, I'm all good now" is not necessarily accurate and we need to wait on more conclusive data.

The 1918 Spanish flu was so deadly because we didn't have mechanisms to stop it spreading, the first version went through everyone, then it mutated because of field hospitals in World War I.  The worst case scenario of everyone gets Covid and that gives it lots of chances to mutate and then we have something deadlier, though not much talked about, has literally already happened.  The "no lockdowns" approach to this has a not insignificant chance that we end up with something worse than what's on our hands now.  In fact that's how coronaviruses work in the first place--we get them because a harmless form mutated into something we can catch.

I get why he's angry believe it or not.  I myself have weird mental health issues to some extent at this point.  It sucks.  But he should start by getting basic facts right.  Perhaps the video is old at this point.  Also, don't get angry about the lockdown.  Get angry about the government not doing more when they could be and should have been.