Covid, covid, covid

The United States beat the world record on covid yesterday. Our 100,233 cases in 24 hours beat the daily tally India set last month of 97,894 cases. I was listening to CNN this morning and they said we pretty much had a new case every second in this country and a death every two minutes. Well I guess records are made to be broken. It is a sad mark in any case.

I have to admit that I have a hard time reconciling this grim news with the cheery news coming out of the government on a daily basis. You know, we're rounding the corner, the microbe is in our rearview mirror, covid deaths have gone to practically zero according to Donnie Jr., ditto the recent White House Press release crowing that one of the administrations successes was having ended covid. Mission Accomplished! But perhaps a tad premature...

The recent spike and resurgence is not a factor of more testing. It is a result of politicizing a pandemic and an administration continuing to ridicule mask wearers and spreading disinformation. Conservative friends of mine still tell me that the whole thing is overblown, will mysteriously end the day after the election.

Hospitalizations are up and so is positivity. Hospitals that have beds don't have adequate staff. But they tell us everything is going to be peachy keen.

Just how stupid do they think we are? Piss on us and tell us it's raining...

From the Daily Beast:

A staggering 46 percent of coronavirus tests are coming back positive in South Dakota at the moment—but Gov. Kristi Noem has “no opinion” on masks and her team thinks everything is going just fine, The Wall Street Journal reports. The positivity rate is eight times more than the World Health Organization’s recommended 5 percent threshold at which businesses can safely reopen. But Noem’s senior advisor Maggie Seidel said, “We feel pretty good about where we’re at. The governor is not going to change any of her approach—why should she?” Noem has been ambivalent about face masks, writing in an opinion piece last week that “those who don’t want to wear a mask shouldn’t be shamed into wearing one.

18 Trump rallies have led to 30,000 COVID-19 cases and seven hundred deaths: Stanford University study