Burning down the house
Covid-19 is raging out of control
chart courtesy twitter.com/tbpinvictus
I just can’t with this anymore.
Yesterday, Germany reported 442 new cases of Covid-19.
The United States reported 62,425 on July 8th - and the odds are extremely high that that’s an undercount. By any measure, Covid-19 is absolutely raging out of control here in America. We have lost any potential to manage this pandemic we might’ve gained by shutting down in March and April. Infections are spiraling out of control, and what’s more, a considerable chunk of Americans have decided to pretend it isn’t happening, and that it isn’t a big deal if you get sick.
Neurologists are on Wednesday publishing details of more than 40 UK Covid-19 patients whose complications ranged from brain inflammation and delirium to nerve damage and stroke. In some cases, the neurological problem was the patient’s first and main symptom.
…
One coronavirus patient described in the paper, a 55-year-old woman with no history of psychiatric illness, began to behave oddly the day after she was discharged from hospital. She repeatedly put her coat on and took it off again and began to hallucinate, reporting that she saw monkeys and lions in her house. She was readmitted to hospital and gradually improved on antipsychotic medication.
Another woman, aged 47, was admitted to hospital with a headache and numbness in her right hand a week after a cough and fever came on. She later became drowsy and unresponsive and required an emergency operation to remove part of her skull to relieve pressure on her swollen brain.
Just the flu, you say? Strange, I don’t recall the flu having symptoms like the ones Melinda Wenner Moyer describes in a New York Times op-ed piece:
The more we learn about the coronavirus, the more we realize it’s not just a respiratory infection. The virus can ravage many of the body’s major organ systems, including the brain and central nervous system.
Among patients hospitalized for Covid-19 in Wuhan, China, more than a third experienced nervous system symptoms, including seizures and impaired consciousness. Earlier this month, French researchers reported that 84 percent of Covid patients who had been admitted to the I.C.U. experienced neurological problems, and that 33 percent continued to act confused and disoriented when they were discharged.
I live in New York City. The sound of ambulance sirens wailing ceaselessly in March and April through the day and into the night will haunt me the rest of my life. If you weren’t here then, I cannot describe it to you. 22,719 people have died here in New York City; if we weren’t sick ourselves, we know someone who was; and so many of us know someone who died of this plague.
That number includes me. My mother fell ill in mid-March (March 19, to be exact); it’s July 10th, and she’s still recovering, nearly four months later.
If you’re like me, and you’ve taken this shit seriously since February and March, it is absolutely soul-crushing watching the pandemic spiral out of control thanks to a series of murderous, irresponsible, and morally depraved decisions by state and federal officeholders — led by the most depraved, murderous, and unfit of them all, the President. It’s his quotes that are peppered all over the chart above, each more delusional and malevolent as the numbers climb.
It’s fucking horrible. It’s heart-breaking. So many of us have done the right thing by staying home, and keeping our distance and wearing masks when we’re not. We should be over the worst of it by now, had we anything remotely resembling competent leadership. We’re the ones who yearn most — and, fuck it, let’s be real here, most deserving — for something resembling a return to normalcy.
And instead I’m looking at people in places like Florida and Texas and Arizona and Kansas throwing tantrums and utterly losing their shit about the slight physical discomfort and social awkwardness that comes with wearing a cloth mask because they haven’t had to, and the only response I’ve got is this:
Fuck off, assholes.
We should be getting over this, getting ready to go back to work, go back to seeing our friends and families, go back to recreating in parks and trails, watching our favorite teams play each other, just like every other country in the world that isn’t led by a depraved asshole, supported by other depraved assholes.
But we’re not. And because we’re not, instead we’ve got to accept that we’re in this shit for the foreseeable future.
I cannot explain to you what it means to care for each other. Please: stay home as much as you can. Wear a mask if you have to go out, keep your distance from people when you do. You don’t want to get Covid-19; you don’t want your friends and family to get it.
Black Lives Matter may be the largest movement in U.S. history — between 15 to 26 million Americans participated in protests.
Siddhant Adlakha on watching Hamilton on film, five years after its Broadway debut — "It was made for a different America, and today, it’s easy to wonder whether that America ever existed at all."
Silicon Valley elite discuss journalists having too much power in private app — in response to the leak, Srinivasan started offering Bitcoin bounties for memes mocking Taylor and other journalists.
Poynter on how the move to capitalize “Black” happened at the AP and in many newsrooms — the New York Times announced the style change on June 30th.
NYT on the racial inequity of coronavirus — new federal data shows Black and Latino people disproportionately affected nationally.
Techdirt’s Mike Masnick on the ridiculous Harper’s open letter — "we want to present bad ideas without losing our readers or our jobs". This is the only thing you really need to read about that vapid waste of pixels. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, consider yourself extremely lucky.
Former Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges, saying the quiet part very loudly — “White liberals, despite believing we are saying and doing the right things, have resisted the systemic changes our cities have needed for decades. We have mostly settled for illusions of change, like testing pilot programs and funding volunteer opportunities.”
Native South Americans were early inhabitants of Polynesia "DNA analysis of Polynesians and Native South Americans has revealed an ancient genetic signature that resolves a long-running debate over Polynesian origins and early contacts between the two populations."
However it was that you first learned about Mandy Patinkin, you might not know that he recorded a truly excellent album in the late ‘80s. Appropriately titled "Mandy Patinkin", it was released in 1989. The YouTube playlist unfortunately does not preserve the nature of the medleys on the album, but it's still an amazing listen.
And that’s how we’ll close this out.
Look: I love you folks. I took a break because honestly, I don’t want to waste your time unless I’ve got things to say. If you want me to write more frequently, I’m happy to do so; I love writing. But I’m under no illusion that the things I have to say are worthy of remembrance, but maybe that’s just me.
Anyway: stay healthy, stay safe, stay indoors. And take care of yourselves…and each other. Until the next time.