Tax revenues in most first world countries haven't been funding most government projects/spendings in a long time, and Japan is no exception. Tax payers aren't going to pay more tax because of this bill, and if taxes increase in the future, it won't be because of it either. 

As for raising import taxes, it is an indirect solution compared to the proposed bill, which on the surface at least, seems like of a direct response that achieves quicker results. 

Japan isn't my own example, I only transcribed to the part of the interview that seemed interesting to spare people the time of watching the entire thing, it's the host of the show who chose Japan as an example.

Disregarding all of this, and even in a vacuum in which Japan wasn't mentioned, Dr Fauci's response using the UK as example was dumb, the UK didn't change course because of what was happening, we changed course because of what the models predicted would happen, it's not because we tried the "herd immunity" approach and it failed.

I read the other day that movies of this genre have seen an uptick apparently. I actually downloaded Contagion today since I've never seen it. It also led me to watching 12 Monkeys for the first time the other day, which I've seen referenced quite a few times over the years. It was a bit to trippy for my liking. Pitt's role in the film instantly reminded me of Fight Club. Outbreak was pretty decent as I remember it.

No clue, I haven't been following any briefings anymore. Not much new information there.

I've been racing today and playing around with Google Earth. It's pretty impressive how far they've come

https://earth.google.com/web/@43.73538233,7.42306323,1.01619111a,428.4208191d,35y,12.0730221h,72.59323257t,-0r

And everything all over the world says "temporarily closed" !

Most advanced is part of the problem, because people seem to think it means we're invincible superhero's, yet far from it. We're simply better than we once were, but what we once were not so long ago, was a joke. Calling ourselves advanced is more than just an understatement. At our core, we aren't much different than we used to be. We can be better though, and it's times like this that wake us up to it.

"Something's gotta go wrong because I'm feeling way too damn good". The petty bickering about the little things has blinded people from the real problems. When those real problems then show up, countries or the world grind to a halt and everyone wonders how it happened and how things went so wrong. There's many to blame for this, right down to the people themselves, to a lesser degree though.

People have stood by and watched others suffer from the beginning, and there's many reasons for it. One being a person or group can only do so much in general, let alone when those same people believe in free will. While helping other people can be good, too much help can be detrimental. Not to mention that not everyone wants your help, because not everyone believes what you believe, and doesn't necessarily want what you want. It's up to them to make the change necessary in the end if they want to better themselves as some might see it. Sometimes you can change their mind through direct communication and cooperation, and others you have to give them an indirect push, by making things a little bit hard on them. Usually a direct push, does the opposite you want it to, unless you decide to rule with an iron fist afterwards, which would go against your beliefs, and would set bad example.

Deal with it the way I usually do. Take care of myself and those close to me, and help those who want it and who will make good use of it. Set a good example and hope others follow suit. The world is beyond a complex place, so consistently worrying about problems to big to be solved as quickly as we would like to solve them, is simply worry for the sake of worry. You don't turn a blind eye, you just take it day by day, and be thankful for whatever good you've been able to accomplish.

I'm kinda hoping for that.  I got money parked into money market accounts just waiting for stocks to bottom out...

Plus, I got 4 guns - 2 handguns and 2 AR's and lots o' ammo if the shit hits the fan. Bring it on.

Jesus is having an effect, numbers in a lot of countries are taking a dive for Good Friday, resulting in much lower Saturday numbers. The effect might last all weekend including Easter Monday. Both reported cases and reported deaths are down in a lot of places. Not that the virus takes a break of course, but the people testing and reporting can desperately use a break.

Europe has been working through a lot of corrections from France, UK, Ireland, Belgium, all changing/updating reported cases and deaths. it's starting to stabilize again and (now without Turkey) is back to an avg 36K new cases per day, before Easter will artificially take it down. The USA is also seeing the Easter effect but to a lesser extent so far or perhaps there was more growth left to discover. The USA was averaging 33K new cases per day at the end of the week.

Europe has been sort of stable for 2 weeks currently, the USA for about a week, what's interesting is that the percentage of reported deaths vs reported cases is very different:
Europe: 11.4%
USA: 5.9%
World: 7.8%
Either the USA is testing twice as much as Europe, or the USA is under reporting deaths, or the virus is half as deadly in the USA. I doubt the last part. The strain going around in the USA is slightly different from the one in Europe but the experts say this has no effect on the virus, it's only a few base pairs, just enough to identify the mutation.
https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global
Europe has been adding nursing home deaths (not everywhere though) while the USA afaik still only counts identified covid19 deaths in hospitals.

The differences in Europe are big as well:
Spain: 12.4% reported cases are going down sooner than deaths, 8.5% compared to peak reported cases
Italy: 14% reported cases are going down sooner than deaths, 10% compared to the peak reported cases
France: 18% adding nursing home deaths
Germany: 4.3%

Not a lot of consistency between countries' reporting methods.

+

FDNY (fire deparement new york)

Usually they see ~24 people die to heart attacks, everyday.
Now its "well over" 200 each day.

"not noted down as due to coronavirus"  (dispite majority had symptoms of such)


Also again.... this virus doesnt kill everyone it infects instantly.
You lose a slow drawn out fight to it, over a few weeks.

Outbreak spiked earlier on in europe than it did in the US.
So give it a week or two, you'll likely see matching US numbers.

Unless the effects of those medicine cocktails the president has been mentioning are being used and proven to work.

More like: nobody's there to count the victims and report the numbers. Like every weekend, just stronger.

They wouldn't work this fast, the results of that will also not have an impact for several weeks. And it's probably just small trials for now like this for example
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2007016

In this cohort of patients hospitalized for severe Covid-19 who were treated with compassionate-use remdesivir, clinical improvement was observed in 36 of 53 patients (68%). Measurement of efficacy will require ongoing randomized, placebo-controlled trials of remdesivir therapy. (Funded by Gilead Sciences.)

It won't be used widespread until more is known. There is more being tested atm
https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-covid-19-treatments.html


And yep, deaths lag 2 weeks behind reported cases, but Europe has been sort of steady in reporting for 2 weeks now. 14 days ago the 3 day average was 34K for Europe, yesterday 36K, a bit higher, yet corrections (late received test results) are still having an effect on the running average. Thus averages in the past were a bit too low, and averages atm are a bit too high, relatively speaking. Of course all of the reporting is still too low.


The US is about a week behind Europe. USA crossed the avg 100 reported a day 11 days after Europe did and is currently 8.7 days behind Europe for total reported cases, yet 14.5 days behind for total reported deaths. The USA's reported cases stopped growing for about 7 days now, while Europe has been flattish for about 15 days now.

The upticks in the European data are mainly from France throwing out big numbers with targeted mass testing of nursing homes.