It's hard to believe we are living through the 2nd worst pandemic since the Black Plague (so far) and the stock market is at an all-time high. 774,682 people are dead (so far) and we're adding 300,000 cases per day around the World and 500 people PER DAY are dying in America from this virus. Remember when 4,000 people died on September 11th, 2001? Sure you do.
We're about to mark the 19th anniversary of that tragedy in 3 weeks and over 10,000 Americans WILL DIE between now and then. The whole nation took action when 9/11 happened to prevent additional deaths, now we seem to have simply lost all sense of proportion in this tragedy and we've certainly lost the will to act. We're even sending our children back to school without having taken any sort of reasonable action to keep them safe.
Of course this is a crisis of leadership, the Democrats did a good job of laying that out at their convention yet there's about 40% of this country that will never be convinced. We've developed herd immunity to idiocy and now it washes over us like the tide – there's little we can do to stop it anymore, so we just learn to live with it.
No one is outraged, no one is doing anything about it, we just accept this incompletent Government and the deaths of our friends and neighbors as if that's just "one of those things" – even though 95% of the countries in this World have made huge progress getting their infections under control, the US, Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Peru, Mexico and Columbia are all now in the 500,000 case club – though none are close to America's 5.44M infections, despite India having 5 times our population.
On May 25th, there were 18,000 new cases in the US as many states rushed to re-open, under the encouragement of the Trump Administration and the Republican Congresspeople and Governors we entrust with the lives of our families. On June 25th, we were hitting 40,000 new cases per day and despite re-closing in most states, we're still at that level.
Sending the kids back to school where they will mix with hundreds of other kids and then go home to infect their families who will then go to work and infect their co-workers, who will then infect their children who will go to school and infect others is, very possibly, the worst idea in the history of human-kind. Yet we're doing it, aren't we?
You can see right on that chart that re-opening caused a disaster and that was without large gatherings of people – that was just with bars and restaurants, etc. This is re-opening and putting 50M children (17% of our population) into small buildings with poor air ciruclation under conditions that make it impossible for them to maintain social distancing and we're doing it without providing the funding or equipment to make for a safer learning environment. Are we really going to be surprised at the result?
Allowing the exponential spread of the disease will eventually make protecting the vulnerable an impossible task. All our islands of safety for the ill and elderly are endangered when the sea level of infection rapidly rises. Many Americans simply don’t understand what exponential growth means. Five million infections can quickly bloom to 25 million infections, and higher. Even with a relatively low fatality rate, this could easily leave more than half a million Americans dead.
The successful control of infectious disease – using bed nets against malaria, adhering to AIDS medications, social distancing to inhibit the spread of the novel coronavirus - is ultimately a matter of individual behavior. Successful attempts to improve such behavior on a large scale require a consistent message from all the commanding heights of a culture - the medical profession, the government, the church and the media.
We need new leadership, plain and simple.
It's up to you to demand it.
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