I'm COVID Cautious and Proud of It
We’re slowing down when we should be speeding up, due to pandemic fatigue, along with a spate of stupidity from the likes of County Supervisor Jim Desmond.
It’s time to be more careful than ever. A deadly combination of advocates for herd immunity, anti-vaxxers, and business boosters who put profits over people threatens us all.
Society is in a race with the COVID-19 virus to get to a state of “normal,” and the virus is pulling ahead as we near the finish line.
Federal officials and epidemiologists say they're worried we could hit another tipping point, leading to a fourth significant surge of infections, hospitalizations and deaths.
Average daily reported cases are up 10% compared to a week earlier, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows. Hospitalizations and deaths, which usually lag cases by a few weeks, have inched upward as well, after a decline and plateau that began in early January.
KUSI TV, which has given access to just about every crackpot out there peddling nonsense on the pandemic, has provided Supervisor Jim Desmond with a platform to call for Gov. Gavin Newsom to apologize “to the millions of Californians whose lives he’s ruined.”
“He needs to stop putting politics before human lives,” says Desmond, who’s campaigned nonstop for bringing an end to public health measures designed to slow the rate of infection.
Citing studies in pay-to-play journals, he says evidence exists that lockdowns don’t work. (Evidence also exists that they do, along with “it depends on how you ask the question.”)
One of those journals, Scientific Reports, has a history of publishing junk science, like the June, 2019 since retracted “study” claiming the sun was causing global warming. Another, from 2018, suggested that too much bent-neck staring at a cell phone could grow a “horn” on the back of the head.
Desmond included a study published by Frontiers in Public Health concluding that neither lockdowns nor lockdown severity were correlated with lower death rates. It only took a moment on Google to discover the papers at Frontiers which can be interpreted as a danger for public health, most prominently that notorious opinion paper claiming that AIDS is not caused by HIV Virus.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an original signatory of the “let the old people die” Great Barrington Declaration, was among his sources.
It just so happens that the declaration was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian, free-market think tank headquartered in western Massachusetts. The Institute is in a network of organizations funded by Charles Koch -- a right-wing billionaire known for promoting climate change denial and opposing regulations on business.
So the question remains, “who’s putting politics before human lives?”
Is it County Supe Desmond, using his bad science sources to remind people about the recall Newsom movement?
Don’t get me wrong here. Politicians across the ideological spectrum have yielded to pressure from the “herd immunity” whiners, and Newsom certainly is one of them.
But it seems kinda loco that one of those Reopen California types would be upset with the California Governor’s attempt to meet them halfway. Then again, comprise isn’t exactly an admirable quality in right wing politics these days.
The bottom line for Desmond, et al., is that the economy is more important than humanity.
If you want to see a stupid politician playing this game, check out New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. As witnesses and victims of his misogyny have emerged, New Yorkers have been granted more “freedom.” The result has been a 45% increase in COVID cases in New York State, along with a 64% increase in New York City over the past two weeks.
Still, the leading edge of this wave of stupidity encompases the Republican Party, as Michael Gerson points out in a Washington Post op-ed:
It is the sign of a sickness deeper than covid-19 that the defiance of public health guidance has become a political selling point in the Republican Party.
Consider the case of South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem. Speaking last month to the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference, she stirred some presidential buzz for her proud resistance to basic virus control measures even at the height of the pandemic. “Now let me be clear, covid didn’t crush the economy, government crushed the economy,” Noem told the conference. “South Dakota is the only state in America that never ordered a single business or church to close. We never instituted a shelter in place order. We never mandated that people wear masks.”
Noem continued: “We have to show people how arbitrary these restrictions are, and the coercion, the force and the anti-liberty steps that government takes to enforce them.”
Now let me be clear. South Dakota has the second-highest case rate and the eighth-highest covid death rate in the country. In that sparsely populated state, the disease has taken the lives of nearly 2,000 people. And Noem’s defiant inaction has made that number higher than it should have been. What level of hubris, extremism or insanity does it take to crow about one of the worst covid records in the nation? Noem might as well be campaigning for higher office in a hearse.
I’ve had both my Moderna shots and I still take precautions. A significant majority of people share my point of view, especially when it comes to associating with those who can’t be bothered to protect themselves and others.
Governor Greg Abbott has gone so far as to sue local governments seeking to impose public health measures. But the citizens of the Lone State state aren’t wild about his lack of concern.
The Texas Rangers opened all 40,300 seats at Globe Field on Monday for a game against the Milwaukee Brewers. Only 12,911 fans showed up.
From a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken last week:
But foreshadowing the social challenges that may emerge as the United States begins to pull out of the yearlong pandemic, the latest poll showed a majority of Americans want to limit the ways in which unvaccinated people can mix in public.
Seventy-two percent of Americans said it was important to know “if the people around me have been vaccinated,” according to the poll.
A majority - 62% - said unvaccinated people should not be allowed to travel on airplanes. Fifty-five percent agreed that unvaccinated people should not work out at public gyms, enter movie theaters or attend public concerts.
When asked about the workplace, 60% of Americans said they wanted to work for an employer “who requires everyone to get a coronavirus vaccine before returning to the office” and 56% thought unvaccinated workers should stay home.
We can expect the Jim Desmonds of the world to join the hue and cry about “freedom” as sentiment builds for some method of verifying vaccinations.
I say bring on the passports.
https://twitter.com/RVAwonk/status/1376907591817834497?s=20
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