Glad, Sad, and Rad COVID Numbers Have Stories To Tell
San Diego County reached an important milestone yesterday, as health officials announced that 75% of residents eligible for the coronavirus vaccine are now fully vaccinated.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a bubble.
The United States leads the world in coronavirus deaths per day (1,504), as well as daily new cases (156,000+, according to a seven-day average calculated by the Reuters COVID-19 Global Tracker.
We’re #1! At something! Sadly, other numbers tell us why.
The high COVID numbers in the U.S. are attributable to our low national vaccination rate (52%) compared to other industrialized nations. We rank 38th in the number of doses administered per capita, and 36th in terms of how many of the country’s residents are fully vaccinated.
As well as the more contagious Delta variant of the virus has become the dominant strain, hospitalizations have spiked. The unvaccinated are 29 times more likely to need hospitalization versus those who are fully vaccinated, with new evidence pointing to even if the vaccinated coronavirus, they’re less likely to spread it or have it for as long as those who didn’t get the vaccine.
Results from a recent Economist/YouGov poll suggest that vaccine hesitancy will remain the driving force in the months to come with 18% of respondents not interested in getting the vaccine and 9% saying they’re still unsure.
Nationally, the numbers provide another glimpse into the nature of the problem.
Via Christopher Ingraham:
But several months into the Delta wave and the data are clear: over the past month, people living in the most staunchly Republican counties have been three times more likely to die of Covid than those living in Democratic strongholds. While the disease doesn’t make political distinctions, Republican attitudes, conspiracy theories and policy failures have created conditions in which the Delta variant can thrive.
In counties where Donald Trump got fewer than 20 percent of 2020 presidential votes, for instance, there have been, on average, fewer than 5 Covid deaths for every 100,000 people since July 31, 2021 — roughly the start of the latest wave of death corresponding with the Delta variant. In places where he got 80 percent or more of the vote, on the other hand, the death rate is closer to 15 per 100,000. Across all counties there’s effectively a dose-response relationship between Republicanism and Covid mortality: as the share of Republican voters increases in your county, your likelihood of dying from the disease rises as well.
https://twitter.com/BillKristol/status/1432739181512511493?s=20
Here’s one last quip from Ingraham:
The GOP calculus seems to be that the electoral gains to be reaped from whipping up opposition to Covid measures among the party base will outweigh the losses from whatever percentage of that base ends up dying. It’s easily the most breathtakingly cynical political strategy I’ve witnessed in my lifetime, revealing a stunning level of contempt for the true believers in the party who end up laying down their lives for the cause.
https://twitter.com/B52Malmet/status/1432763863557050370?s=20
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It’s been more than a decade since Carrie Prejean was stripped of her Miss California title by Donald Trump following a series of scandals. Depending on whose version of the events you buy into, she was canned for being wishy washy about same sex marriage or being unwilling to live up to the terms of publicity contracts.
Everybody sued everybody, and then they settled.
“CNN subsequently reported that Prejean's settlement with Miss California USA officials was prompted by the revelation of a "sex tape", a home video involving Prejean.”
For a few years, Prejean was a darling of the right, following publication of her autobiographical “Still Standing: The Untold Story of My Fight Against Gossip, Hate, and Political Attacks. “
She surfaced locally after speaking at an Encinitas school board meeting last week as reported by the Big Lead sports page; (Her husband is former NFL quarterback Kyle Boller):
Carrie Prejean Boller wore a shirt that said, "MAMA," and referred to herself as a "mama bear," as she told everyone the pandemic is over, while her hype woman echoed her points from off-stage. By the time her two minutes were up, Prejean Boller had announced she would be running for school board and many of her friends would be joining her.
On Sunday evening Carrie and Kyle went out to dinner with Pastor Leann and Pastor Jurgen [of Awaken Church], who were in the news a year ago for holding services inside in violation of public health orders.
Wait! Wasn’t Prejean in the news in Charlotte, North Carolina recently as leader of a group protesting another school district’s masking policy? Why yes, she was.
https://twitter.com/inminivanhell/status/1432368067795898368?s=20
Or maybe her kids were going to no school at all:
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Here’s Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi with an idea that might just solve two problems at once:
People are not taking ivermectin because they think they are horses; they are taking it because they think experts are asses. It is not the sort of problem you can fix by trying to rationalise with people – or by sneering at them. When people are convinced that the mainstream media and “elite” are conspiring to stop them taking horse drugs for political reasons, there is no argument you can mount that will convince them otherwise.
I have no idea how we get people taking vetted vaccines instead of farm medicine. However, there is a brilliant legend about Frederick the Great and potatoes that I think is instructive here. Basically, Old Fritz was keen to get Prussians to eat potatoes because they were cheap and nutritious. His subjects, however, did not want to be told what to do. So the king came up with a cunning plan: he acted as if the potato was only for the elite, and had his soldiers “guard” fields of them. The reverse psychology worked. Villagers started coveting potatoes.
Now I’m not saying we should bury Covid vaccines in ditches with signs saying “THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA DOESN’T WANT YOU TO TAKE THIS”. All I’m saying is, at this stage, anything is worth considering.
https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1432763327583825920?s=20
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Lead photo by Ross Allison Loar