A (fleeting) outbreak of honesty at the White House!


Every now and again, when pushed to the wall by events, a senior White House official makes an honest statement – and doesn’t get fired for it by Trump. This happened yesterday, when Chief of Staff Mark Meadows stated on CNN that “We’re not going to control the pandemic.” This is 100% true, if you take “We” to mean the current administration, which is why we need a different administration to step in as soon as possible. The WaPo article continues

He compared the virus to the flu and said the administration is making efforts to contain it, even as the Trump campaign faces criticism for holding large campaign rallies while coronavirus cases are on the rise.

Of course, this is nonsense. The administration isn’t making serious efforts to contain the virus, but is making serious efforts to undermine the measures that are needed if we are going to contain it, including mask wearing and widespread testing (and of course, the latest coronavirus relief bill looks destined to go nowhere, despite – or really because of – the tens of billions of dollars it provides for testing and contact tracing).

Trump repeatedly draws a false dichotomy, saying that the only way to contain the virus is to shut the economy down and he refuses to do that. But even some red states put the lie to that canard. In an editorial today, WaPo said:

Remember that huge spike in Arizona? Sustained mitigation worked: Public events were limited; bars, gyms, movie theaters and water parks were closed temporarily; restaurant dine-in capacity was reduced; and people voluntarily stayed home and wore masks where not mandated. Tough sacrifices, to be sure, for a tough situation. New cases fell by 75 percent in about a month. 

It's really tragic that so many more people will die in the coming months, when many of them could have been saved if we had an administration that actually wants to fight the virus, rather than waving the white flag. In fact, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington (whose numbers were touted by none other than Prof. D. Trump last April Fool’s Day) says there will be 375,000 deaths by the end of the year. Given that there have been 230,000 deaths as of yesterday, this means there will be 145,000 more deaths this year.

And given that there are just two months remaining in the year, this means there will be 72,000 deaths in both November and December. Compare that to the approximately 24,000 number I’m projecting this month, it means monthly deaths will close to triple this month and next. Furthermore, this means daily deaths will average more than 2,000 for the rest of the year. We averaged 1,994 deaths a day in April, the worst month so far.

Remember all the refrigerator trucks? I hope they’re still available. They should start heading now from New York to the Dakotas, Montana, Utah, etc. And they should step on the gas!

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How naïve I was…

On March 18, 2020, I put up my fifth post in this blog (this is my 356 th post, for those keeping score at home). I had written my first pandemic post (although I wrote it on my cybersecurity blog ) on Saturday, March 14. This was right after I’d read a really disturbing article that shattered my assumption that the unfortunate incident in Wuhan two months previous could never happen here. I recently reread the March 18 post because a significant number of people have been reading it in the last couple of months, even though I haven’t referred to it at all. Of course, I can’t ask those people why they’re reading it, but what struck me when I reread it was my (in retrospect, of course) incredible naivete when I wrote it. It’s instructive to read some of my statements, a little more than three years later: Since there have already been thousands of deaths worldwide (but not yet tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions), the battle is to keep that number as low as pos
Read more

It’s all about health care

Over the weekend, there were two momentous events in Washington that will undoubtedly have a seriously negative effect on the health (or lack thereof) of the American people. However, just one of these events on its surface seems to be about healthcare. In this post, I will discuss the one that doesn’t seem to be about healthcare, but actually is. Barring some unforeseen development before then, in my next post I’ll discuss the other event. The former event was the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday and Mitch McConnell’s immediate (i.e. about 1 ½ hours after her passing was announced) announcement that he would push through Trump’s nominee before the election – assuming four Republican Senators don’t block that process. Why is this event about healthcare? Because the Supreme Court is set to decide in December a case that would literally overturn Obamacare and cause more than 20 million people to lose healthcare coverage in the middle of a pandemic.   The case is based on a ridi
Read more

An up-close look at a hospital breaking under the Omicron load

This opinion piece in WaPo today provides a horrifying perspective by an ER doctor on the situation in her ER on a “typical” day of the omicron wave. It shows very clearly that lack of beds is just the beginning of the problem. The lack of staff at all levels – EMTs through nurses through physicians – is really hurting, but even worse, it’s leading to more burnout among the existing staff, which of course is making the staffing shortage worse, which of course is increasing burnout…lather, rinse, repeat. I have two ideas for Joe Biden: First, turn Build Back Better into another Covid relief bill, this one focused entirely on building back the hospital staff (and infrastructure, although that’s not the main problem) that we need to handle what – as the author points out – will undoubtedly be an overload of the system for a long time to come. This is both because we’re almost certainly not finished with Covid, even when the omicron wave subsides, but because there is a big backlog
Read more