It’s late Monday night and I’m really tired, and we’ve been working hard to put this week’s paper together, so I pretty much have only one thought, and it’s for all you smug people out there who keep insisting that a lot more of us are just going to have to die (and are doing everything you can to make that likely) so we can have our economy and our “freedom” back.
Fine.
You go first.
Keeping it simple
The only two numbers you need to know to understand what is meant by “pandemic,” what is happening now, what is going to happen and why:
1918.
1919.
Here’s an excerpt from an Associated Press story that ran this week:
“Despite a century’s progress in science, 2020 is looking a lot like 1918.
In the years between two lethal pandemics, one the misnamed Spanish flu, the other COVID-19, the world learned about viruses, cured various diseases, made effective vaccines, developed instant communications and created elaborate public-health networks.
Yet here we are again, face-masked to the max. And still unable to crush an insidious yet avoidable infectious disease before hundreds of thousands die from it.
As in 1918, people are again hearing hollow assurances at odds with the reality of hospitals and morgues filling up and bank accounts draining. The ancient common sense of quarantining is back. So is quackery. …
In 1918, no one had a vaccine, treatment or cure for the great flu pandemic as it ravaged the world and killed more than 50 million people. No one has any of that for the coronavirus, either.
Modern science quickly identified, mapped its genetic code and developed a diagnostic test, tapping knowledge no one had in 1918. That has given people more of a fighting chance to stay out of harm’s way, at least in countries that deployed tests quickly, which the U.S. didn’t.
But the ways to avoid getting sick and what to do when sick are little changed. The failure of U.S. presidents to take the threat seriously from the start also joins past to present.”
Who gets it
According to a recent column in the Seattle Times by Danny Westneat, a national poll showed that 72% of the women surveyed said it is a bad idea to go back to “normal” too soon.
Who doesn’t
According to the same poll, only 58% of men said it’s a bad idea to lift restrictions too soon.
Public service announcement
Here are all the reasons you should trust the president, his family, his cabinet, the vice president, Mitch McConnell, Fox News, talk radio, Sinclair television stations, macho gun-toting idiots blocking hospital entrances or swaggering in front of public buildings with their confederate flags, whiny attention junkies like Tim Eyman and Clint Didier, fake info factories, anti-vaxxers, COVID-19 “truthers,” conspiracy theory lunatics or Southern governors with your lives, your health, your economy or the future of this country:
