I’ve been watching the evening news, masochist that I am. More than once in the last few weeks, I’ve seen someone break down crying about the loss of their beloved family member. I’m not made of stone, so I feel a little sad.
Then they weep, “I didn’t know that COVID was REAL!” I bite my lip. In a recent comment on my blog, the blogger fillyjonk wrote, “I find myself irrationally angry at so many of my fellow citizens. ” I tend to agree with her, except for the “irrationally” part. NOW, they believe?
Still, I was STUNNED to read an article in Vanity Fair this month. What Do You Do When Your COVID Patient Doesn’t Believe In COVID? The online version is quite explicit: “‘It’s the Trump Bubble.'” OMG. “The Right Has Created a Wave of COVID Patients Who Don’t Believe It’s Real.”
Even before getting to the story itself, this description. “A Texas nurse had a patient in a COVID ICU tell her the virus is ‘fake news.’ A California nurse was mocked for wearing a mask. As a new wave of COVID-19 sweeps the country, health care workers are grappling with the consequences of the president’s misinformation machine. ‘This is insane,’ says one. ‘I have never seen anything like it.'”
I am literally holding my hands to my head, fearing that it will somehow explode. COVID deniers with COVID.
Nothing is real
“Gigi Perez, a California–based nurse… told me, ‘The COVID-19 unit I work in has already lost seven nurses in the last three months due to the burnout from managing these types of patients.’ In the last two weeks, Perez said, nine of her fellow health care workers have contracted COVID-19. Workers are ‘beginning to resent the public for not doing their part to help control the pandemic,’ she said.”
And this. “An infectious disease doctor who asked to remain anonymous told me he had never before experienced politics overshadowing science in the medical field. ‘Before [Donald] Trump I never spoke politics in the clinic room,’ he said. ‘There is no doubt that COVID splits into fact-free and factful worlds. This is why we have a raging epidemic.”
In WaPo, read about a Missouri county health director. Concerning contact tracing, she says, “Probably half of the people we call are skeptical or combative. They refuse to talk. They deny their own positive test results. They hang up. They say they’re going to hire a lawyer. They give you fake people they’ve spent time with and fake numbers.”
While downplaying the pandemic from the beginning, the despicable regime behavior started in earnest on April 3. That’s when IMPOTUS said his experts were “now recommending Americans wear ‘non-medical cloth’ face coverings.” He said “the recommendations… were voluntary and that he would not partake. ‘I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.”
And the die was cast. Now, hospitals in half the states are facing a massive staffing shortage as Covid-19 surges.
White flag
Here’s a story in the Boston Globe. With COVID-19 victory in sight, America surrenders. “What’s happened to us? A lifetime ago, Americans endured years of Great Depression suffering, then went off to fight World War II or, on the home front, tightened their belts, stretched their rationed food, and planted Victory Gardens.”
But that’s not us. “Yes, this isolated, socially distanced existence is tiresome, particularly in cold weather. But we have salvation, in the form of vaccinations, within sight… Then life will begin to return to normal.”
This past summer, the writer “had a chance to catch up with an old pal from high school who, long a Republican, has become a Fox News conservative. The good news, said my friend, who has a graduate degree, was that if the Democrats won, the big to-do about COVID-19 would end on Nov. 3. Why, I asked? Because, he said, it was all a big hoax to get Joe Biden elected. We joke a lot, so I assumed he was kidding. No.”
So it makes “sense” that when the CDC urges against Thanksgiving travel, it will be largely ignored. In the New York Times, a writer traced his COVID-19 bubble and it’s “enormous.” He was thinking a dozen or two, but it was over 100 people.
And much of the blame for the current explosion of cases must fall on a regime that has announced in October, “We are not going to control the pandemic.” That’s the truth. About four dozen of them have had the virus.
I am SO angry with the regime’s handling of the crisis. Americans are dying unnecessarily. And the buck stops there.
I remember in February, I thought “maybe we’ll get this under control like with the original SARS.” I remember in April, I thought “surely things will be better enough by Thanksgiving that I can go see my mom.” Now, facing my first-ever holiday seasons alone*, all I can think is “maybe by next year we’ll be vaccinated and it’ll be safe to travel again.
I saw a man on the news this morning, in a crowded airport, saying “I’m 64 years old and I want to be happy!” as justification for him traveling when the CDC asked all of us not to. And that’s the problem right there. I want to be happy too, but more than that, I want the people I care about (and even people I don’t know) to live, and I figure their safety is more important. But not everyone feels that way. Which is why what I thought if February and in April turned out to be wrong.
At this point I am just praying it will still be safe enough to go to the grocery store to shop in-person come December.
(*and the added frisson is my stupid brain is reminding me that my mom is 84, my brother and his family live VERY far away and have their own lives, and so this is a dry run for how I will do it after my mom is gone, and……that’s really more heaviness than I need)
Filed under My Stupid Family:
One sister updated her FB photo to a pic of herself in a mask. Her own son shamed her into taking it down. She was being ironic, but he didn’t get the joke and shot her down like a 12-point buck.
The other sister was still having people over for drinks in March. When her husband contracted Covid, she said, “I guess we weren’t being as careful as we should have been.” But Thanksgiving? Both sisters are getting families together this year. “Same as every year, we aren’t letting ourselves be stopped by a hoax.”
Thank God Luka, Lex, and I have been spared their sad antics for years now. And since Luka came out as trans, I’m pretty sure we are off the hook forever. AMEN!!
Can you imagine Americans during anything comparable to The London Blitz? Can’t you hear my relatives? “I like having my curtains open at night, and no guv’mint is gonna tell me I can’t do it.” Honestly.