The Coronavirus

[pbrower2a]

The 64th, 65th, and 66th largest cities of the United States are Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh, estimated to have 300,000 to 303,000 people. COVID-19 is in that league now in America. Cities are collections of living people; COVID-19 has killed enough people to be in the league with these cities of historical, cultural, and commercial prominence, at least in the past.

About 300,000 lives in America are now completely in the past because of COVID-19.

[Bob Butler 54]

The coastal media has long been critical of Trump's handling of the pandemic.  The latest example of that is a reduction already in the amount of vaccine they are releasing.  They promised each state a given number of doses, and they are reneging on that promise, blaming the manufacturer for the lack.  The manufacturer has rejected that, saying there is no shortfall on their end, that they have the doses sitting in a warehouse waiting on federal direction on where to send them.  With the Trump administration's habit of lying, the coastal media is taking the company at their word.

No one seems to know why this shortfall is taking place.

[Bob Butler 54]

California seems to be the new epicenter for COVID.  The dominant factor?  Thanksgiving seems to mark considerable COVID fatigue.  While some degree of isolation, masks and other precautions took place before the holiday, since people have relaxed considerably.  I know Massachusetts if facing a similar rise, though it as shown up more in the waste water samples than at the hospital thus far.

CNN has an article on why the recent surge.

[Bob Butler 54]

I heard one rumor that new strains have developed in the UK and California, and it is not clear that the vaccines will be good against the new strains.  If so, some sort of race may develop between the vaccine developers and the bug.  If so, the crisis might end up being extended.  The unraveling selfishness may be given more chance to change to the crisis willingness to sacrifice for the community.

Or else?

[Eric the Green]

(12-20-2020, 02:32 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I heard one rumor that new strains have developed in the UK and California, and it is not clear that the vaccines will be good against the new strains.  If so, some sort of race may develop between the vaccine developers and the bug.  If so, the crisis might end up being extended.  The unraveling selfishness may be given more chance to change to the crisis willingness to sacrifice for the community.

Or else?

This was reported about the UK strain on Bloomberg and elsewhere; it's true. But no evidence has yet shown that the vaccines would not work on the new strain. We'll see.

[pbrower2a]

We just passed Henderson, Nevada on the grim tour of demographics; the next stop is the City of Horses, Lexington, Kentucky. 320,500 deaths.

[Bob Butler 54]

(12-20-2020, 07:22 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(12-20-2020, 02:32 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I heard one rumor that new strains have developed in the UK and California, and it is not clear that the vaccines will be good against the new strains.  If so, some sort of race may develop between the vaccine developers and the bug.  If so, the crisis might end up being extended.  The unraveling selfishness may be given more chance to change to the crisis willingness to sacrifice for the community.

Or else?

This was reported about the UK strain on Bloomberg and elsewhere; it's true. But no evidence has yet shown that the vaccines would not work on the new strain. We'll see.

A CNN report on Europe and its response to the new strain.

Edit:  A second CNN article.  Walter Reed Hospital is reviewing to see if the mutated strain ignores the vaccine.

[Bob Butler 54]

December 21. The darkest day of 2020. Isn't that redundant?

[pbrower2a]

... and some people still have unqualified faith in Donald Trump even if he has appeased an enemy that has already killed 322,000 people in America.

Words other than the most vulgar fail to express my feelings.

No, I do not want to be numbed. I want to keep humanizing the statistics. Every death has a person behind it.

[pbrower2a]

The world total of deaths is approaching the deaths related to the Battle of Stalingrad.

[pbrower2a]

The US total is now approaching one third of a million. I doubt that the virus is taking any holiday on Christmas Day -- and neither are the heroic medical staff who have the grim task of caring for people who should have better taken care of themselves. 332 thousand now, which is about the population of Santa Ana, California, America' 57th-largest city, so that grim sort of accounting may have to go.

Cities start thinning out from here, as the next city in size is Honolulu (population 345,000). It isn't that long ago that I mentioned Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis together.

Nobody dies without an effect upon others. Certainly not the medical staff whom I expect to be scarred by their experiences. Some -- maybe convicts about whom nobody could care about except their 'brothers' or 'sisters' under incarceration, or the last member of a family, may have died or may die with nobody noticing other than medical staff or some official who registers the death.

In case you think that my discussion of COVID-19 is macabre... there is no other way in which to discuss a disease so macabre in its own right.

Wear a mask in public; wash your hands often; avoid crowds. Don't try to cheat medical advice. COVID-19 is making this a lonely, boring, frustrating, unpleasant world. If you think that is bad... consider also death for having that effect..

[pbrower2a]

From ten days ago:


By ADAM GELLER
December 16, 2020
[/url][url=https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https://apnews.com/article/mlb-pandemics-coronavirus-pandemic-8d4b4db61ca93c8b4a7b7827313fa0f6]

Month after dismal month, Americans have been inundated by an ever-rising tide of devastating numbers. Hundreds of thousands of deaths. Tens of million unemployed.
By mid-December, five in every 100 Americans — more than 16 million — had been infected by COVID-19.
Those numbers testify to a historic tragedy. But they don’t fully capture the multitude of ways, large and small, that the virus has upended and reconfigured everyday life in the U.S.


For that, there are a host of other numbers. Some may be less familiar than others, yet all are just as telling in calculating the pandemic’s sweeping impact:
Miles that Americans did not drive because they were unemployed, working or studying from home and traveling less: 35.3 billion (through August)
School lunches and breakfasts that went unserved in March and April after schools were closed: 400 million
Number of people participating in meetings on Zoom each day last December: 10 million
Number of people participating daily in Zoom meetings by the end of March: 300 million
Employment rate of low-wage workers as the year nears its end, compared to January: down 20.3 percent
Employment rate of high-wage workers compared to January: up 0.2 percent
GO BACK TO THE PANDEMIC ATLAS

• – A pandemic atlas: How COVID-19 took over the world in 2020
  

Share of small businesses that are still closed even as the U.S. economy has reopened: 28.8 percent




Drop in the number of passengers traveling on U.S. domestic flights this spring: 272.01 million, a decline of 76 percent (March to July, compared to the same period in 2019).
Dollars the international airline industry has lost this year: $118.5 billion
Passengers screened by Transportation Security Administration agents at U.S. airports on April 14 last year: 2.21 million
Passengers screened by the TSA on April 14 this year: 87,534
Number of TSA screening agents who have tested positive for COVID: 3,575
Number of TSA agents at New York’s John F. Kennedy International who have tested positive: 152
Number of people who went to a New York Broadway show during the first week of March: 253,453
Number of people who have been to a Broadway show since mid-March: 0
Number of jobs lost at New York City restaurants and bars between February and April: 233,751
Number of jobs regained at New York City restaurants and bars from April through September: 89,559
People who applied for a job at Amazon.com in a single week, after the online retailer announced a hiring fair to keep up with skyrocketing orders: 384,000
Payments to Americans by the Internal Revenue Service to help ease the pandemic’s economic fallout: 153.1 million checks and direct deposits through August, totaling $269.3 billion
Americans’ spending on restaurants and hotels, compared to January: down 36.6 percent
Americans’ spending on transportation, compared to January: down 50.9 percent
Americans’ spending on entertainment and recreation, compared to January: down 64.3 percent
Americans’ spending on groceries, compared to January: down 2.7 percent
Total sales of alcoholic beverages during the pandemic: $62.5 billion, up 21.8 percent
Online sales of alcohol in September compared to a year ago: up 256 percent
Sales of tequila for home consumption in September and October, compared to a year ago: up 56 percent
Champagne: up 71 percent
Ready-to-drink cocktails: up 131 percent
Production increase in bottles of Purell hand sanitizer this year: up 300 percent
Number of Purell single-pump “doses” contained in bottles shipped to U.S. hospitals this year: 54 billion
Dentists who closed their offices entirely, or to all but emergency patients, in April: 97.1 percent
Dentists whose offices have reopened, but with fewer patients than usual: 65.6 percent
Dentists who say they are seeing more patients who grind their teeth, usually an indicator of stress: 59.4 percent
Games played during Major League Baseball’s regular season last year: 2,430
Fans who attended those games: 68,494,752
Games played during MLB’s shortened regular season this year: 898
Fans who attended those games: 0

https://apnews.com/article/mlb-pandemics-coronavirus-pandemic-8d4b4db61ca93c8b4a7b7827313fa0f6

[Bob Butler 54]

CNN has noted that one in 1,000 Americans have died of COVUS.

[pbrower2a]

Two politicians from very different countries, both of COVID-19:

A reminder on how dangerous COVID-19: it can kill the rich and powerful even if they live in the most disciplined society that people generally think free.


Yuichiro Hata (羽田 雄一郎, Hata Yūichirō, 29 July 1967 – 27 December 2020) was a Japanese politician of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan and a member of the House of Councillors in the Diet of Japan. A native of Setagaya, Tokyo, and graduate of Tamagawa University, he was elected to the House of Councillors for the first time in 1999, a position he retained until his death in 2020. Hata was the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism from 4 June 2012 to 26 December 2012. He was the son of the late Prime Minister Tsutomu Hata.

Hata was a member of the Itochu Foundation during his time as a student at Tamagawa University. He graduated from the univeristy with a Bachelor of Arts in March 1993. Early in his career Hata was a secretary to his father, Prime Minister Tsutomu Hata, during the latter's tenure in the House of Representatives.[1]

Hata served as member of the House of Councillors in the Diet beginning with his election in 1999.[2] He was affiliated with the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the Democratic Party for the People (DPP) after the merger of the Democratic Party and Kibō no Tō, and finally Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP) after the DPP's dissolution.[3] On 4 June 2012 Hata was appointed to be the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism by Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda.[1] Following the loss of the Democratic Party of Japan to the Liberal Democratic Party in the 2012 Japanese general election, Noda and his Cabinet, including Hata, were succeeded by Shinzo Abe and his Cabinet on 26 December 2012.[4] In all, he served as a legislator for five terms and was the initial Secretary-General of the Upper House caucus of the CDP at the time of his death in December 2020.[5]



Generally, Hata was part of Japan's center-left political parties. He was a member of the DPJ and later, the CDP, both of which are center-left parties. He held positions consistent with the platform of those parties. He was opposed to the revision of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution that prohibits Japan from going to war. After the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, he became critical of Japan's use of nuclear power, stating that the country should aim to get rid of its plants eventually and that the country should not support nuclear projects in other countries.[8] Hata was a supporter of agricultural protectionism in regards to fair trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.[9][/url]



Yuichiro Hata died in Tokyo on 27 December 2020 at 53 from COVID-19 while being transported to University of Tokyo Hospital.[2] He is the first Japanese legislator to die of the disease.[5][url=<br /><br /><span data-scefontsize=x-small style=font-size:x-small color=#000000 face=sans-serif]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuichiro_Hata

Elected to the US House of Representatives... died of COVID-19 before he could be inaugurated. Died at age 41.

Luke Joshua Letlow (December 6, 1979 – December 29, 2020)[1][2] was an American politician from the state of Louisiana. A Republican, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives for Louisiana's 5th congressional district in 2020 but died of COVID-19 before he could take office. Before his election to Congress, Letlow served as chief of staff to retiring Representative Ralph Abraham.

Letlow worked for Bobby Jindal during Jindal's tenure in the United States House of Representatives for Louisiana's 1st congressional district as his congressional district director from 2005 to 2008, and during Jindal's first term as governor of Louisiana as director of intergovernmental affairs from 2008 to 2010.[6] He then worked as director of government and community affairs for QEP Resources, an energy company based in Denver.[7][1] Letlow returned to Louisiana in 2014 to serve as campaign manager for Ralph Abraham during his election for Louisiana's 5th congressional district.[4] He served as Abraham's chief of staff during his three-term tenure.[5]


On March 9, 2020, after Abraham honored his pledge not to serve more than three terms, Letlow announced his candidacy.[8] Abraham publicly endorsed him concurrent with Letlow's announcement.[5] In the nonpartisan blanket primary on November 3, Letlow finished in first place with 33% of the vote, while State Representative Lance Harris, a fellow Republican, finished second with 17%.[9] Letlow won the December 5 runoff election with 62% of the vote.[10][11]

Per Louisiana state law, a special election will be required to elect a candidate to represent the congressional district. The district, which includes much of Eastern Louisiana, is predominantly Republican.[12]

Letlow lived in Start, Louisiana, with his wife, Julia, and their two children.[5]
On December 18, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Letlow announced that he had tested positive for the virus. He was hospitalized in Monroe.[13] After his condition deteriorated, he was transferred to the intensive care unit of Ochsner LSU Health Shreveport on December 23.[14] On December 29, Letlow died of complications of COVID-19 at the age of 41, five days before he was scheduled to be sworn into office.[2][13] The hospital reported that he had no underlying conditions when admitted but died in the ICU of a heart attack after a procedure.[8]

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards ordered flags in the state to be flown at half-staff on the day of Congressman-elect Letlow’s funeral.[15]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke_Letlow

[pbrower2a]

Also Dawn Wells, a/k/a "Mary Ann" of Gilligan's Island.

She died of COVID-19.

[pbrower2a]

Just remember: COVID-19 is still killing.

Quote:1/13 (Today): <W>
Cases: 23,616,345 (+248,120 | ΔW Change: ↓11.07% | Σ Increase: ↑1.06%)
Deaths: 393,928 (+4,329 | ΔW Change: ↓0.94% | Σ Increase: ↑1.11%)

The death toll has already surpassed


52 Bakersfield California 384,145

53 Cleveland Ohio 381,009

54 Aurora Colorado 379,289

55 Anaheim California 350,365

56 Honolulu Hawaii 345,064

America's biggest tropical tourist destination, Home of Disney's Magic Kingdom, home of one of the finest symphony orchestras in America (as well as the Cleveland baseball, basketball, and football teams), and "Nashville West".

Next two stops on the grisly tour of urban comparisons:

51 Wichita Kansas 389,938

50 New Orleans Louisiana 390,144

I could make a sick pun about New Orleans being "The Big Easy"... there's nothing easy about dying of COVID-19.

Almost certainly within the next few days:

49 Arlington Texas 398,854

The Dallas Cowboys and the Texas Rangers play here.  One of America's biggest suburbs.  

48 Tampa Florida 399,700

47 Tulsa      Oklahoma 401,190

Probably the same day as Arlington, Texas.

-- and probably in time for Inauguration Day:

46 Minneapolis Minnesota 429,606

45 Oakland California 433,031

Home of Clorox Corporation, which strongly disparages President Trump's suggested (internal) use of its bleach products. (Use it to clean surfaces, of course!)

...I expect the Storming of the Winter Palace... excuse me, the Capitol Building... to be another big super-spreader event.

[beechnut79]

(01-14-2021, 02:47 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Just remember: COVID-19 is still killing.

Quote:1/13 (Today): <W>
Cases: 23,616,345 (+248,120 | ΔW Change: ↓11.07% | Σ Increase: ↑1.06%)
Deaths: 393,928 (+4,329 | ΔW Change: ↓0.94% | Σ Increase: ↑1.11%)

The death toll has already surpassed


52 Bakersfield California 384,145

53 Cleveland Ohio 381,009

54 Aurora Colorado 379,289

55 Anaheim California 350,365

56 Honolulu Hawaii 345,064

America's biggest tropical tourist destination, Home of Disney's Magic Kingdom, home of one of the finest symphony orchestras in America (as well as the Cleveland baseball, basketball, and football teams), and "Nashville West".

Next two stops on the grisly tour of urban comparisons:

51 Wichita Kansas 389,938

50 New Orleans Louisiana 390,144

I could make a sick pun about New Orleans being "The Big Easy"... there's nothing easy about dying of COVID-19.

Almost certainly within the next few days:

49 Arlington Texas 398,854

The Dallas Cowboys and the Texas Rangers play here.  One of America's biggest suburbs.  

48 Tampa Florida 399,700

47 Tulsa      Oklahoma 401,190

Probably the same day as Arlington, Texas.

-- and probably in time for Inauguration Day:

46 Minneapolis Minnesota 429,606

45 Oakland California 433,031

Home of Clorox Corporation, which strongly disparages President Trump's suggested (internal) use of its bleach products. (Use it to clean surfaces, of course!)

...I expect the Storming of the Winter Palace... excuse me, the Capitol Building... to be another big super-spreader event.

With all the carnage that this virus has created, one thing for the positive side of the ledger is that America did need some downtime. Just a sorry shame that it took the fear of deadly disease to bring it about.  Have pointed out many times that most Americans have difficulty when it comes to being able to set aside some time to relax and regroup. A new book titled “Can’t Even” by Anne Helen Petersen examines the Millennial Malaise in great detail.

[pbrower2a]

One marker of a Crisis Era is lasting effects upon the culture. Think of the seemingly innocuous children's rhyme:

Ring around the rosies
Pocket full of posies
Ah-choo! Ah-choo!
All fall down!

The "ring" was a reddish rash, one of the first signs of plague.
The pocket full of posies was the desperate but ineffective herbal 'cures'
Ah-choo! Ah-choo! was of course sneezing.
All fall down -- people die.

Oddly this was not published until 1881, and it was first sung to its existing tune in 1795.

[pbrower2a]

We just crossed 400,000 deaths from COVID-19.

The COVID-19 Train of grisly comparisons just made stops in Arlington, Texas (as I understand, America's biggest suburb) and Tampa, Florida. It is fast approaching Tulsa, site of an infamous super-spreader event in the 2020 campaign.   



 

Tulsa isn't the problem. Trump is. He still is.

[pbrower2a]

(01-14-2021, 10:00 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(01-14-2021, 02:47 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Just remember: COVID-19 is still killing.


...I expect the Storming of the Winter Palace... excuse me, the Capitol Building... to be another big super-spreader event.

With all the carnage that this virus has created, one thing for the positive side of the ledger is that America did need some downtime. Just a sorry shame that it took the fear of deadly disease to bring it about.  Have pointed out many times that most Americans have difficulty when it comes to being able to set aside some time to relax and regroup. A new book titled “Can’t Even” by Anne Helen Petersen examines the Millennial Malaise in great detail.

Management-labor issues have typically been forced to go one way, with the rich getting richer and the others going deeper in debt, bleeding or selling assets, or going from being net creditors to net debtors. 

When unions were strong and pay was good, more Americans  were happier with their lives. People with blue-collar jobs actually had savings accounts and whole-life insurance policies. Savers are happier than debtors. They have more money for the surprisingly-expensive gift for a loved one. They have a reserve for a big car repair or the breakdown of an appliance. They can see themselves putting money aside for a dream vacation or a child's college fund. They see their work creating a better future instead of paying interest to creditors.

Oh, but what about the marvelous technology of our time that people did not have then? If one is priced out of cable TV, then three channels of free television are better than none.