trump wants to speed up the "Stay at Home" efforts to flatten the curve on Coronavirus infections and have everybody back at work and school and every other place of catching the damn bug by the time Easter Sunday rolls around, which is in three weeks.
Even though a ton of medical - and even a few economic experts - are screaming that we're nowhere near the end of this crisis, and that re-opening everything can make things worse. Via German Lopez at Vox:
In recent days, Trump has been walking back previous suggestions from public officials — including his own remarks at earlier press briefings — that social distancing will be required for months. He said on Monday, “America will, again, and soon, be open for business. Very soon. A lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting. Lot sooner. We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”
But experts are clear about the massive risk that ending social distancing early — in weeks instead of months — could pose.
“Everybody living through this wants to not be in this situation,” Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “But the call to end it soon — and saying that’s his intention — is not based on public health. There’s nothing to suggest that ending it soon will have any good impact at all.”
Instead, ending social distancing prematurely could cause more deaths. “More people will become infected. More people will get sick. More people will die,” Kates said.
Epidemiological models back this up. They indicate that coronavirus cases will rise if social distancing measures are relaxed, potentially causing hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths in the US alone...
trump does not know nor does he care to know that the Christian churches he's hoping to pack can be vectors for infecting tens of people at a time, if not hundreds. We've already got evidence across the globe that religious gatherings as well as any other gatherings like business conferences, music concerts, bar nights, what have you will be places where COVID will show up as well and go from one person to three (or six, or fifteen, or 34, or...)
And trump is latching onto Easter Sunday weekend because, obviously, it's a date on the calendar he can't forget, even as he himself ignores going to church while he stumbles to his own damn golf courses every weekend.
trump - along with a scary number of Republicans and Far Right pundits - are more terrified of a consumer-driven economy shutting down than they are of the COVID outbreak killing hundreds to thousands of our loved ones. CHRIST, the Texan Lt. Governor openly claimed older people would rather die than let the economy tumble, we've got Glenn Beck offering himself up like a "noble sacrifice" as though he'll ever truly risk crawling out of his studio safe place and expose himself to any poor infected soul.
There's a level of sociopathy - Go Ahead And Kill Grandma! - to the Republican fears of an economic downturn during an election cycle that chills the bone. Remember when the "Tea Party" Republicans were all screaming about Obamacare "Death Panels" for our grandparents back in 2010? They turned out to be wrong about that... and here they are willingly lining up our grandparents in 2020 as a Death Panel unto themselves.
Say again: CHRIST, this is evil.
And if trump does this, orders all the states to end their Shelter-In-Place orders, force restaurants and bars and public places to open during Good Friday through Easter itself... we will be doing it while the medical predictive models still have us with tens of thousands carrying the virus and infectious enough to spread COVID even more.
We are so Honest-To-God fucked right now.
1 comment:
President cornered rat wants to open the country on Easter, although since he didn't close anything, I don't know what he thinks he's going to open.
Governor homicidal moron of Mississippi signs an EO countermanding the efforts of city and county governments there to slow the spread of COVID-19.
"The Federalist" suggests "COVID-19 parties" to deliberately infect children.
If these brain-wizards were running a Taco Bell it would go out of business and/or be shut down by the health department.
Couldn't they maybe just go fuck themselves and let grownups fix the mess they have already made?
Perhaps we need to help them a little, and to that end funding for voting by mail was included in the third stimulus package we may get on Monday.
Speaking of which, the Pig People are losing their shit over all of the "pork" in the stimulus bill, once again demonstrating that they don't understand the meaning of economic stimulus, or much of anything else, really.
Florida is in really bad shape right now, as symptom tracking apps have shown them to be harboring huge numbers of fevers, even when controlled for seasonal colds and flu. Meanwhile, the wingnut governor there refuses to implement statewide social distancing rules and several pastors there have continued to hold services for their congregations all together at once.
With their large population of retirees, this seems gratuitously hazardous to the health and well being of the state, but at least so far DeSantis hasn't prohibited local governments from taking their own measures to protect their citizens like Reeves has in Mississippi.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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