The House Is on Fire. The President Keeps Saying It's a Tremendously Large Fireplace.
If you test more people for COVID-19 you will discover more confirmed cases of COVID-19. If your country conducts a lot of tests, they're likely to find more confirmed cases. Still, there are ways to decipher whether an increase in confirmed cases is merely a function of the fact you're testing more, or whether it indicates the virus is spreading widely and quickly in the community. Perhaps the best one is to look at the percentage of tests administered that are coming back positive. If a high percentage are positive, that strongly indicates that the disease is on the move in a big way.
In Florida, for instance, a Republican-run state which had extra time to examine the early failures of New York and New Jersey's Democratic leaders and proceeded to fuck things up anyway, as much as 20 percent of COVID-19 tests are currently coming back positive on a given day. That's really bad. A couple of weeks into this summer surge in the Sunshine State, this is having other measurable consequences. "At least 56 intensive care units in Florida hospitals reached capacity on Tuesday," CNN reports, citing state officials. "Another 35 hospitals show ICU bed availability of 10% or less." While defenders of the failing response in Florida, Texas, Arizona and elsewhere have cited the low death rates so far—and that is very much a blessing—the experts call deaths a "lagging indicator." It takes weeks to die of COVID-19, and the deaths are surely coming. In Texas, as in New York in the early days when the city opened up a portal to Hell, people are starting to die at home.
It is not in debate, really, whether the American slice of the coronavirus pandemic has spun out of control. The Fox News Channel, a loyal ally to both the president who has fucked this up and the Republican governors who have fucked this up, could not avoid the bare facts this morning. The United States had more than 62,000 new confirmed cases on Wednesday, a single-day record. That put us over 3 million cases total, number one in the world. We've got 132,000 deaths, also USA #1. Twenty-five percent of the world's deaths spread across just over four percent of its population. A complete and total failure, and a deadly one.
Yet this is what we were greeted with Thursday morning from the President of the United States.
For the 1/100th time, the reason we show so many Cases, compared to other countries that haven’t done nearly as well as we have, is that our TESTING is much bigger and better. We have tested 40,000,000 people. If we did 20,000,000 instead, Cases would be half, etc. NOT REPORTED!
First and foremost, what in God's name is this man trying to say? Even after the bizarro fraction, the 100-word vocabulary strikes again. We're 'round the bend many times over at this point, but would it kill this guy to work with people who actually know things—assuming some remain in his administration—to formulate a message for the public that represents the informed strategic vision of the national government he leads? Ah, right. We didn't elect someone to run the government, we elected someone to put on a show. Not to mention that, on a more basic level, the guy is completely fucking nuts. He cannot articulate any sort of agenda for the second term he's asking for. There is no plan.
It's not the first time he's peddled this crap, of course. He seems to tweet it every morning like clockwork. We only have more cases cuz we test more. We only have more cases cuz we test more. We only have more cases cuz we test more. Never mind that the folks who actually know about this suggest we're probably missing the vast majority of actual cases. This indicates the death rate is indeed low, but because this thing is so contagious, a lot of people are going to die. Again: 130,000 people have already died. This is something the president basically never mentions, except to say it's better than 2 million people dying, which is true but isn't really the point, unless the point is to set the bar low enough that he looks good, which it is. And even for many people who survive, this is still no joke. This is a nasty bug, and we still don't know what this does to you in the long term. Yet he dismisses all of this, making things up out of thin air. It's almost like he simply does not care about you, or your grandma, and has never devoted a moment's thought to whether you live or die.
The fact is that the national government has given up even the pretense of trying to contain the pandemic. Rather than try to address the situation that exists in reality, the president is trying what he always does: to bend the contours of that reality to his kaleidoscopic specifications. If enough people believe his account of what's going on, it might as well be true. Except that works better with The Caravan than with a pandemic. He's now trying to force schools to re-open, regardless of how severe the outbreak is in the area in which they're located, in the delusional belief it will help his re-election prospects. Remain calm! All is well!
As Chris Hayes put it on Twitter, we're trying to find a way to live in a burning building. The president's trying to tell us it's a floor-to-ceiling fireplace. Other countries are not doing this. They put out the initial blaze and are working to contain the new fires when they come up with testing and tracing and swift isolation. This is how adult countries do it. We are led by a petulant child, and now we have become one, even if we've always papered over our horrors and crimes with national innocence. The consequences will be terrible.
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