Day 134…
Numbers. Numbers. Numbers.
Charts are trending up. Infections. Hospitalizations. Deaths. By this time tomorrow, we will have surpassed the four million threshold level of new cases.
A healthcare worker on TV this morning said that this virus will never go away now that it’s appeared. Like HIV/AIDS, it is something that we will just learn to live with.
Governor Brian Kemp was one of the first Governors to reopen their state and he has been proven tragically wrong. Georgia’s new daily cases doubled in the last month and hospitalizations have tripled. 150,000 new cases.
Kemp is still in the mask-wearing feud with Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. He sued her for defying him and mandating the wearing of masks in her city. Yesterday he suggested that maybe residents of the state should consider wearing them.
His stance against the masks is not so much against the health concerns, but instead it’s political. He is a Republican. One of the basic differences between Republicans and Democrats comes down to what each side believes the size and reach of the government should be. The Democrats believe in large government, with regulations that keep everyone on the same path. The Republicans, on the other hand, believe in small government. They believe that it is not the government’s business to tell people how to live.
Democratic Atlanta Mayor Bottoms wants to force everyone to wear a mask.
Republican Governor Kemp wants to let everyone make their own choice.
My personal beliefs in what government should be lines up far more along Democratic lines than Republican ones. I fundamentally do not believe that people are capable of making choices that do not align with their own interests. I’m not saying ALL people aren’t capable of that. Many people are capable of doing that in SOME circumstances and then can’t in others.
Many people simply cannot bear to be told what they should do. Even if a rule benefits them, they want to be able to make that choice themselves.
Every single human being on the planet needs to consume a certain amount of clean, fresh water every single day of our lives. There are no exceptions to that. We ALL need it.
Besides drinking it, we also use it for many other things. Transportation. Energy production, Irrigation. Cooling. Manufacturing. Cleaning. There is, however, only so much of it available. Most of the other things we do with water potentially renders it, afterwards, unfit for drinking.
The Clean Water Act was initiated in 1948 and has been added to and adjusted several times since. To quote the Environmental Protection Agency’s website, the purpose of the act is to “establishes the basic structure for regulating discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States and regulating quality standards for surface waters.”
If everyone who uses water for something else was responsible enough to take care of it, none of these regulations would be necessary. The objections to this act all boil down to people who want to do something else with the water and do not want to pay the extra money or take the extra effort required to ensure that when they are done using it, that we will still be able to drink it.
This Republican administration is doing everything in its power to deregulate the nation’s use of water. They want to be able to fast-track new oil and gas pipelines, among other things, without the responsibility for maintaining the integrity of our nation’s water.
I was working with somebody during the last election who voted Republican. This was remarkable only because those of us in the Arts tend to skew almost completely Democratic. I am sure that more people in the Arts than I think vote Republican, but they certainly don’t admit it. This person I was working with was feeling ostracized by everyone else because he wasn’t hiding his choice.
I asked why anyone in the arts would vote Republican (on top of everything else this person is from an ethnic community that the Republicans are decidedly not supportive of) and the response was that this person believed in Libertarianism and the Republicans lined up more closely with that than the Democrats did.
Here is a definition of Libertarianism from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Libertarianism is a family of views in political philosophy. Libertarians strongly value individual freedom and see this as justifying strong protections for individual freedom. Thus, libertarians insist that justice poses stringent limits to coercion. While people can be justifiably forced to do certain things (most obviously, to refrain from violating the rights of others) they cannot be coerced to serve the overall good of society, or even their own personal good. As a result, libertarians endorse strong rights to individual liberty and private property; defend civil liberties like equal rights for homosexuals; endorse drug decriminalization, open borders, and oppose most military interventions.”
I don’t know what this person saw in the President, or in fact, in any of the Republican platform then that in any way lined up to those professed beliefs, and I don’t see it now.
The whole idea of people being allowed to be responsible for themselves is something, I think, that is just not possible in our society. Our economy is based on capitalism which is simple basic competition. We want to win and most of us are willing to put our needs over the needs of others in order to do that.
Look at those celebrities who were falsifying data to get their kids into good schools. I don’t think they are totally bad people. Michael knows one of the couples. But if the choice is between what’s good for society as a whole and what your own kid needs, I’m guessing that most of us goes with the kid. Does that make us bad? I think it makes us human.
If a parent needs to break the law to protect their kid, honestly, I think that’s what’s going to happen. I’m not judging that impulse at all - I’m pretty sure I’d break the law to protect someone in my family - I just think that none of us can FULLY be trusted to walk the straight and narrow without there being regulations in place and repercussions when we break them. And there should be repurcussions.
Our society needs rules to function. The government, unfortunately, doesn’t always enact rules that align with our best interests either. People in power can use their positions to enact rules that benefit themselves or their friends at the expense of everyone else.
My cousin in South Africa has been charting the coronavirus since this all started. Watching him try to figure out what the data is really showing has been a real lesson in what’s standing in the way of real transparency.
One of the issues in South Africa is the same thing that we are facing here. There is no uniformity in how information is being gathered and evaluated. None of it seems to line up. If a hospital reports that two people have died but a funeral parlor reports that it buried five people, something isn’t right. Either the hospital lied or there are three very alarmed living people trapped in coffins underground.
My cousin spends an endless amount of time trying to reconcile the numbers that he is seeing. He is continually trying figure out which of the many agencies are not reporting in an accurate way, based on other numbers from other agencies. He gets close to what is going on, but he has to make a lot of educated guesses along the way. Trying to find information that is pure is next to impossible. It has all been filtered through a lens that makes the person or organization providing it look better.
None of the states here in the US are accounting for virus data in the same way. If you test 100 people and 25 of them test positive, you have a 25% rate of infection. The problem is that all 25 of those people didn’t get infected on the same day. Some of them might have gotten infected that morning and some of them might have gotten infected two months ago. Some states are reporting them as 25 new cases that day and some are breaking it down and adding the numbers into the statistics retroactively.
Accounting for deaths is all over the place too. People are dying from a whole array of different things, each of which COVID-19 has impacted on a different level. Saying that this person died from COVID and this one didn’t is not that easy.
Defenders of Governor Kemp in Georgia are now saying that he was seeing graphs and statistics that were skewed in such a way that they presented a rosier picture of what was going on with the virus rather than the bleaker truth.
Politicians in all of the states are skewing the information they are getting about the virus one way or another to suit their political motivations. Governor Kemp, like every other Governor, wants to see versions of the data that support his decisions.
The resulting political noise out there is absolutely deafening. It is drowning out basic common sense. It needs to stop. This is not the time or the situation where politics can assume the leading role.
This is a health emergency and we should be listening to the health professionals.
What we require of our President and our Senate and our Congress is for them to unite behind our health-care experts and support them. Mistakes will be made. This is a new virus, there is still much we don’t know. Our politicians are definitely not the ones who will be able to get us out of this. Our healthcare professionals MIGHT.
You cannot take any of the data about this disease at face value - it is all far more complicated than that and our politicians just do not understand how to read it. To be fair, even the health experts aren’t always in agreement about what it means.
The job of our government should be to support our healthcare professionals and then figure out how to make the rest of the society function around the mandates.
That will never work! The economy will be destroyed! That’s madness!
If you look at the places around the planet who have managed to effectively flatten their curves, that is exactly what they have done.
That’s what we did here in New York. Were there mistakes? Yes. Costly mistakes that cost lives. But we got through it. Clearly listening to the health professionals works.
Why aren’t we doing that in the rest of the country when it worked here in New York?
Everyone is sick of the mask discussion. Lord knows I am sick of it, but wearing a mask only works if everyone does it. Nobody wants to wear a mask, but in the middle of a global pandemic, who cares what anyone WANTS? It’s not about keeping the wearer safe from getting the virus it is to HELP THE WEARER NOT SPREAD IT AS EFFECTIVELY TO OTHERS.
We are all human. We are, none of us, perfect. Nobody has all of the answers. This same mask argument happened a hundred years ago during the Spanish Flu pandemic. The general consensus then was that it did make a positive difference.
I hope that in the future it is discovered that wearing a mask really didn’t do anything after all. We can then all sit around in a circle together and laugh our asses off about how ridiculous we all were to wear them.
I don’t like wearing the mask. The last few days the temperatures have been in the nineties which makes it somewhat unpleasant and uncomfortable. Better that, I guess, than finding out later that I inadvertently killed somebody’s mother because I didn’t put one on.
We are living under a Republican government that doesn’t want to make mask-wearing a rule. Fine, but that shouldn’t mean that we don’t wear one. Not HAVING to wear one doesn’t absolve us from being responsible for the consequences of NOT wearing one.
It won’t be forever. Just for now.
And it MIGHT help.
NUMB ERR’S is how I see it
I will wear my mask
and live