Post 274 - December 10, 2020

Day 274…

Seventeen states, via their Republican Attorneys General have indicated their support of the absurd lawsuit that Texas has lodged to try to get to the Supreme Court to overthrow the results of the election in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

SEVENTEEN.

Those states are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia.

All of those states are currently being overwhelmed by COVID-19.

Five of them have the top ten worst case rates in the country. Indiana, alone, is averaging nearly 7,000 new cases a day. Five of them are experiencing the highest death rates in the nation. Yesterday, South Dakota was the leader.

The federal Department of Health and Human Services has been tracking hospital data at the state level. What they are looking for these days is what percentage of hospital beds are being occupied by COVID patients.

They start paying attention when that number gets above 5% and start fearing becoming overwhelmed when that number gets above 10%. That number sounds low until you realize that Hospitals in the United States on average tend to run at about 90% capacity even without the addition of COVID patients. Remember, everything else that can possibly go wrong with us is still going wrong.

The hospitalization rates of eighteen states are currently above 10%. With the exception of Rhode Island, all of those states are in the Midwest or the South. North and South Dakota are above 20%.

The factors that are the real metric of where problems lie are the availability of ICU beds and the number of staff.  You can add as many beds as you want to a hospital, but they aren’t much use if there aren’t enough people available to tend to those extra patients.

As the percentage of virus patients rises, hospitals have to start cancelling elective surgeries to free up the beds. They have to begin turning patients away with non-COVID related issues.

The knock-on effect of all of this is that doctors and support staff who deal with some of those non-critical virus issues start being furloughed or laid off. Hospitals start losing the money from not being able to do those elective surgeries and can no longer pay those people’s salaries.

All of those numbers represent statewide averages. It doesn’t necessarily paint a picture of what is really going on in specific areas.

Larger cities can adjust far better to a massive influx of new patients than remote rural areas can. If one hospital in New York is seeing a surge, then doctors from other hospitals nearby can just hop on the subway and go in to help. Supplies can be shared. In some rural areas, there may not be another hospital within a hundred miles. There isn’t a pool of doctors to pull from. There aren’t any extra supplies anywhere.

Research done by the academic director of the Medical Industry Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota shows that as hospitals occupancy rates rise, so does the death rate. She found that just a 1% rise in Minnesota’s COVID hospital patients corresponds to nearly three additional deaths over the course of a week.

When South Dakota allowed its annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally to happen back in August, nearly half a million people showed up from all over the Midwest. There was little or no mask-wearing and no social distancing at all.

34% of Minnesota’s 87 counties later experienced outbreaks of the virus that could be traced back to the rally. Many of the people affected in Minnesota didn’t even go to Sturgis, they just got it from someone else who brought it back.

There is a meme that has been circulating listing the deadliest days in American History.

The number one deadliest event that the US has experienced was the hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas on September 8, 1900. 8,000 are estimated to have died that day.

The second deadliest day was on September 17, 1862 during the Battle of Antietam during the Civil War where about 3,600 people lost their lives.

The third deadliest day, in the history of the United States was yesterday when 3,100 people lost their lives to the coronavirus.

Five of the top ten deadliest days in our history seem to have occurred just this year and over the last week.

Not everything is on that list. Real numbers aren’t available, but nearly 200,000 people are estimated to have died of the Spanish flu in October of 1918 which would average out to over six thousand people a day.

The three-day-long Battle of Gettysburg likely had at least one day of over 3,000 fatalities and it is estimated that 3,000 people died during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

Just under 3,000 people died on September 11, 2001 when terrorists flew their planes into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the remote farmer’s field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The death toll from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 was about 2,400 people.

This month, we are experience a national calamity of these proportions Every. Single. Day.

The thing that I still can’t get past is that so much of this was avoidable. What we are all currently living through, more than anything else, is a complete failure of American politics.

The President of the United States’ denial of the pandemic gave everybody who attended the rally in Sturgis, South Dakota permission to go and do what they liked when they were there. Everything he continues to say only amplifies that and sends the same message.

Our massive daily death toll is directly traceable back to this man, and more importantly, to the Republicans surrounding him who continue to support him. This is truly all on them.

If you compare our actions with the actions of other countries around the world, you can really see how badly we have responded to this crisis.

South Korea is currently experiencing a surge in their new cases. Since Thanksgiving they have had about 7,000 new cases. Their case total now numbers just over 40,000. As a comparison, as I write this, we are at 15,412,133 cases. We will add a number comparable to their TOTAL number to that in less than two weeks.

South Korea has been successful largely because their society is very different from ours. In South Korea, the government can track its citizens in invasive ways that would drive Americans to the streets in protest. Without submitting to that level of oversight, we can, nonetheless, learn much from what they have been able to do.

They released a new study yesterday about how the virus can be transmitted during indoor dining.

An epidemiologist named Dr. Lee Ju-hyung became intrigued by how some diners in a restaurant contracted the virus from an out-of-town visitor. When these people became infected, there hadn’t been a case of COVID in the city of Jeonju in two months.

In South Korea, the government has access to all of its citizen’s cellphone location information as well as their credit card transactions. They can get a complete print-out in as little as ten minutes.

As I said before, Americans would balk at the very idea of that. Never mind that there are plenty of ways for our government to much of that already. There are people out there who won’t get the vaccine at all for fear that a microscopic tracking chip will be injected into them along with the serum.

When the Korean authorities accessed the information, they found that a high school student, who had been the first person in Jeonju to become infected, had been in the same restaurant as the infected visitor, a salesperson.

They were, however, in the same place for a total of only five minutes.

The salesperson, who was from another town, hadn’t told authorities that they’d been in Jeonju at all back when their infection was first reported.

With the help of an engineer, Dr. Lee recreated the restaurant and studied its airflow.

From CCTV recordings he could see that the two people never spoke. They never touched any of the same surfaces and they never got closer together than twenty feet. However, because in the video a light fixture was swaying back and forth, he knew that a ceiling air-conditioner was on.

He found that the student as well as a third person who also became infected were all sitting in a direct line along the air stream from this air conditioner. People around them who were just inches out of the flow did not get infected.

Without submitting to the same invasive tracking measures that the South Korean government uses, we can still learn from what they have done.

We have never been able to implement even the most rudimentary contact tracing measures here.

When Michael and I were up in Provincetown a few restaurants took our name and number so that they could contact us if any cases were reported from people who had eaten there on the same day that we had.

All well and good, but how would they ever know?

Plenty of people in Provincetown this summer were just visiting. It can take a week or two for symptoms to appear. What is the likelihood that two weeks later when they felt sick that they would actually contact each of the restaurants they’d been in and tell them?

To effectively contact trace, when people test positive, they would have to report everywhere they had been in the last, say, two weeks. Contact tracers would then contact all of those places and inform them. Those places would have taken down all of the other people’s information and, in turn, would contact them so that those people could all go and get tested themselves.

That, or something close to it, is what would have happened in South Korea.

It never happened here. There was a lot of discussion about it, but the federal government never even made an attempt at coordinating it. They never provided individual states with the funding so that even those states who might have been inclined to do it could afford to.

The clear and unvarnished truth is that our Government under this President did and continues to do absolutely nothing whatsoever to curtail the spread of this virus. The few leaders around the country who have tried to take even the most minimal measures like mandating mask-wearing have been met with, at times, armed resistance.

It is utterly mind boggling that we have come to this place.

How does anybody think that this Administration is going to be able to coordinate the distribution of the vaccine?

The Republicans, instead of turning the full force of our national might onto this challenge are, instead, choosing to ignore it. They are putting all of their energies and efforts into manufacturing false claims so that they can overthrow the results of a fair and equitable election. As their citizens die, Republican lawmakers are doing everything in their power to convince them that they aren’t. The truly terrifying thing about that is that their citizens are actually believing it - right up until their final breaths in over-crowded ICU units.

When is it enough? Where do the supporters of the President draw the line?

What has happened to simple basic common sense?

Walking down the streets of New York these days, you pass outdoor dining set-ups on every block. Some of them seem open and spaced, but some of them are so enclosed from the cold that they have ceased being outdoor spaces. Eating inside a roofed enclosure with four walls of plastic is not eating outdoors. That is actually the definition of eating indoors.

You can’t just pull out a tape measure and set tables six feet apart and be able to guarantee that everyone will be safe. To be fair, you should set the BACKS of chairs - with people in them - six feet apart. Even then, the right air movement and the virus is going to travel. As the study in South Korea has shown, distancing only makes the experience safer. It doesn’t make it safe. The airborne virus is going to go anywhere that the air takes it.

We cannot look to the government to keep us safe. This Administration does not care if we are safe or not. Show me one thing they’ve done that says otherwise. This Administration only wants the economy moving forward. That is their sole focus.

We have to keep each other safe. We have to behave with simple basic common sense so that our hospitals and healthcare workers are not overwhelmed.

It’s on us.

Ignore the corrupt politics and listen to your heart.

It can be hard to hear it with all the noise and nonsense that’s raging on around us, but it’s there. It’s beating.

Take a deep breath, hold it, and listen to it.