Last night someone on MSNB observed that we’re suddenly hearing more from Dr. Anthony Fauci these days. Trump is too busy throwing his temper tantrum over the election to care what the task force is doing, I take it. Mike Pence is still the nominal head of the task force, but he appears to be more focused on the runoff elections in Georgia than in public health.
Dr. Fauci said today that we haven’t hit the Thanksgiving peak yet. And it’s bad enough already.
At least 2,857 new coronavirus deaths and 216,548 new cases were reported in the United States on Dec. 3. Over the past week, there has been an average of 180,327 cases per day, an increase of 8 percent from the average two weeks earlier. …
…As of Friday afternoon, more than 14,331,200 people in the United States have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 277,600 have died, according to a New York Times database.
Case numbers are spiking across most of the United States, leading to dire warnings about full hospitals, exhausted health care workers and expanding lockdowns.
The safe assumption is that cases, hospitalizations, and deaths will all reach new highs before Christmas. The virus is simply everywhere. While the spring wave slammed into the Northeast and the summer surge swept over the South, the latest surge, while concentrated in the Midwest, is truly national. Almost every state has seen an increase in cases since September, and nearly 40 states saw COVID-19 hospitalizations reach record highs in the past three weeks. Right when Americans should have separated themselves from new exposures, millions of them shuffled and reshuffled themselves into new combinations of people. This epidemiological experiment seems destined to produce more deaths, more grieving, more illness, and more exhausted health-care workers, who were already on a “catastrophic path” before 9 million people filed through TSA checkpoints in the past week.
Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic:
The pandemic nightmare scenario—the buckling of hospital and health-care systems nationwide—has arrived. Several lines of evidence are now sending us the same message: Hospitals are becoming overwhelmed, causing them to restrict whom they admit and leading more Americans to needlessly die.
It’s not just covid patients; it’s anyone with a serious medical condition now who can’t get the treatments that usually would be available. Try real hard not to have a heart attack anytime soon.
This is what we were warned about last spring when they talked about bending the curve. The idea was not to keep the virus from spreading as much as it was to slow down the spread so that everyone didn’t get sick at once. But that’s out the window now. Meyer and Madrigal also write that hospitals have had to revise their standards of which covid patients are admitted, so that they take only the most acutely ill. A patient who might have been admitted a few weeks ago is now sent home.
I’m living in a state with a Republican governor who refuses to impose mask mandates. I’m back to sheltering in place. I can’t say I ever stopped sheltering in place, actually. All because of nitwits who refuse to take precautions because freedom.
Speaking of Republican governors, see Iowa Is What Happens When Government Does Nothing by Elaine Godfrey at The Atlantic. And then go see Charles Pierce’s commentary on Godfrey’s article, We’ve Been Headed Here Since Ronald Reagan Made His First Joke About ‘The Government’.
The piece, which is written just as well as it is reported, illustrates a complete abandonment of the public health by the state government of Iowa. It arraigns Republican Governor Kim Reynolds, whom it reports, “followed President Trump’s lead.” (Among other delights, Reynolds actively opposed efforts by some of the state’s mayors to take precautions, undermining local mask mandates as soon as they were imposed.) This, of course, left hospital workers hung out to dry. …
… This is beyond neglect. It is negligent homicide by ideology. Everybody in Iowa saw what was coming. The meat-packing plants have been hot zones for months. And everybody can see worse coming in the next several months.
So there we are. It didn’t have to be this bad, but it is this bad. Everybody be careful. We’re in for a rough few months.
