If there are six guys on stage there at the briefing room, all bunched up? At least one of them is a dead man. Or at least gravely ill -- yes, they will get the best of care, just as they do any other time. The odds are still not in their favor. And those guys know it. They're still on the job every day.
They're all rolling Death's dice. Most of them could probably head for the hills and wait it out. They haven't.
These are unusual times and I've instituted some rules for comments here and on my Facebook wall (do they even still call it a "wall" these days? Page, then).
1. Medical advice: it's not a link to a verified authority's page, like the Center for Disease Control, Johns Hopkins, a state Health Department page or a real university, then I will not publish it. If you are not yourself verifably a doctor (M.D. or D.O.) or Nurse-Practitioner, then I will not publish your link or comment. Set up your own web page if you have something you must share.
2. Conspiracy theories of any kind will not get published. They are demonstrable nonsense. If you really believe the Democrats and the media colluded to crash the economy and consider over ten thousand dead in Europe and China so far an acceptable price to accomplish it, you are either gullible or insane. (You also cannot account for how they got the Administration to play along.)
If you can come up with anything other than a dire threat to the entire country that could get Donald Trump, The Mouth That Won't Stop, to speak well of Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo, you are remarkably inventive. And wrong.
The only thing I have seen with a scrap of believability are the Congressthings that sold off stock after a briefing on the crisis and ahead of the bad news about the coronavirus hitting Wall Street, and let's face it, their asses are grass -- no matter how innocent they make it look on paper.
Seriously, knock off the stupid. We are looking at the possibility of deaths in the same numbers as the U. S. Civil War Between The States and if we are careful and lucky, we may be able to get that figure way down -- but not by spreading mental poison spun from a Bond movie.
6 comments:
Thank you, ma'am.
I'm not a math person. That said, this is not complicated when it comes to range of outcomes. None, zero, of them are anything remotely like good. It's like being in a car that juts drove over a cliff. You have all the way down to think about what might result, but you are going down no matter what.
This is why you are one of my favourite humans.
From your lips to America's ears.
A lot of talk of going around about the various lock downs being overkill (often accompanied by why Conspiracy X is behind the response)
There is probably overkill on the responses. The problem is identifying what is overkill and what is necessary now. Not afterwards when everything is tabulated.
There's also the possibility that a little overkill now will save lives and decrease the economic effects down the line.
One of the advantages of Federalism is that each state tailors it's response to it's local environment Afterwards we can look at the various state responses and see what worked and what didn't. (cf Louisiana vs Mississippi after Katrina)
Those whining that Trump is letting a lot of the burden fall on the Governors don't understand that this is a design feature, not a bug.
I've also noticed that few to none of the conspiracy theorists actually work in the Medical/EMS fields, or in government/emergency response.
Or even doing something like volunteering to deliver food to folks being isolated at home with no transport (leave it on the doorstep and back off if it makes you feel better).
Or just about anything else to help, as opposed to kibitzing from the sidelines with no skin in the game as far as taking responsibility for making potentially life or death decisions.
I'm 68, and mostly staying home during the virus contagion. I did make a trip yesterday morning to my local cemetery to view the graves of my mother's older sisters, Ruby and Marie, who died in 1918 during the Influenza epidemic. They were 19 and 21 and passed within days of each other. Mom was a year old and probably survived because she got some immunity thru her mother's milk. My maternal grandmother was born in 1875 and survived the 1889 Russian Flu epidemic from a virus similar enough to the new strain to offer protection. Half the planet was infected in the three waves of the 1917-1917 Influenza, and 50-100 million died; on top of that, my dad's two older uncles went to France, where they both got caught in mustard gas attacks. What was left came home and died the next year. Sometimes a little historical perspective helps; we'll get thru this.
Bruce, thank you very much for that remarkable perspective.
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