Let’s talk about this chart for a moment. (I stole it full on from Financial Times, but I can’t afford an FT sub right now. Sorry FT!)
This is what everyone warned about. If we didn’t have a national plan, and a national goal, and a national vision, and a rally around the flag effect, we’d simply have COVID-19 part two. And we don’t have a national plan, a national goal, a comprehensive testing and tracing strategy. We simply decided that we weren’t going to deal with the virus and have big indoor political arena shows instead. There’s no will in this country to tackle big problems at all.
This chart is starting to look like this chart:
This is the 1918 Spanish flu with its first, second, and third waves. (I stole this off the CDC website — I’m just trashing copyright today.) And then we have this jerk:
‘Slow the testing down please,’ —Pres. Trump said he asked his team to slow down COVID-19 testing to reduce the number of reported cases. A White House official has said that Trump was joking. There have been more than 119,000 COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. as of June 20. pic.twitter.com/6ZsOPYoJa4
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) June 21, 2020
He doubled down on asking people to slow down testing this morning. There’s no way in hell the states should slow down testing under any circumstances. They probably will because he said so and they’re following his lead like lemmings. But that won’t slow down hospitalizations, or ICU visits, or ventilator usage, or deaths. That will just make it easier to gaslight people.
To be fair, this is how Trump operated his entire life. I don’t know why we’re surprised. Do the lazy/evil/corrupt thing and hide it. Layer in lawyers. Make sure no one ever sees the numbers. COVID-19 is just another Trump scam where he screws everything up and then hides the evidence. Sure, ok, 120,000 actual Americans died in the process this time, but he’s a sociopath. He doesn’t care about other humans.
It’s frustrating because:
- It didn’t have to be this way
- It takes real concentrated effort to be this lazy and let the economy get destroyed and let people die.
Meanwhile, Andrew Cuomo is talking about mandatory quarantine for out of state visitors. I have no idea how he’d implement or enforce it, but the point is made.
Just like everyone else, I have some pretty deep COVID-19 fatigue. But I wish he had at least tried to be successful instead of just giving up and failing. A half competent manager — not a fully competent, just a half competent — could have done a better job by empowering the agencies and nodding along to all the recommendations.
Contemplate the FT graph. That’s going to get much worse before it gets better again. The virus does not care about your politics.
Stats:
- 27,553,581 completed tests.
- 2,336,586 positive results. This number is definitely ticking up.
- 122,177 total deaths. This number has slowed down but that’s either because it’s hitting people in their 20s and 30s, or because the new wave hasn’t started killing people wholesale yet.
- 65,205 cases in MD with 3,167 dead
- 1 in every 132 people have it in Howard County. I stopped tracking this number when it was a standstill and I started jonsing to go out but now it’s going down again.
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