Covid, it’s killing kids now, but does the GOP even care?

Living with Coronavirus
(SARS-CoV-2)
Sunday September 5th, 2021
10:10 AM

“Between August 20 and 26, an average of 330 children were admitted to hospitals every day with Covid-19, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  That’s the highest rate of new Covid-19 hospitalizations among children in more than a year — a record that was broken several times in August, according to CDC data.  “This virus that we’re dealing with now is a game changer,” said Dr. Mark Kline, physician-in-chief of Children’s Hospital New Orleans.  “It’s just so easily transmitted from person-to-person.” As of August 9, he said, “half of the children that we’ve admitted have been under the age of 2.”

Meanwhile GOP leaders in several states are still fighting over masks in schools, still recommending unproven medications on TV, punishing teachers and school boards for mask mandates via removal of funds, and in the Case of Governor DeSantis, misrepresenting the rates of deaths in Florida by using different data. In the past they were counting deaths in real time, but DeSantis realized that the pandemic has greatly slowed the governments’ ability to record those deaths by generating an official death certificate.  It’s a backlog of corpses you see.

DeSantis, seeing an opportunity for spin and misinformation, ordered his people to only use the official death certificate, which are greatly delayed by the increased corpses from Covid itself.  This creates a false statistic which shows deaths slowing, because of the slowed backlog.  In reality deaths were climbing steeply as he reported them falling.

I do not know which is worse, that a Governor would stoop so low, or that said governor willfully expects his base to not understand the math and to take his word for it and blame the “lying media”.  All this while actual children are dying from C-19.

Global Infected      216,065,915                   220,441,346                       
Increase             4,375,431
7-day average        625,061 infections diagnosed daily –DOWN

Global Dead          4,496,379                                          4,564,360
Increase             67,981
7-day average        9,711 deaths daily –DOWN

USA Infected         38,761,757                                       39,908,072
Increase             1,146,315
7-day average        163,759 infections diagnosed daily –DOWN slightly

USA C-19 deaths      637,258                                         648,121
Increase             10,863
7-day average        1,551 deaths daily –UP, back to a Titanic a day

Maine Infected       75,381                                             78,071  
Increase             2,690
7-day average        384 infections diagnosed daily –UP

Maine deaths         930                                    940
Increase             10
7-day average        1.4285 deaths daily –UP

The far right of the Grand Ole Party has pushed the law so far that women in Texas who were raped by their fathers are no longer allowed to get that pregnancy terminated, but forced to carry it to term.  To go around Roe V Wade they set the law up Soviet style.  That is, they are relying on “neighbors” to report and sue their “neighbors” if they believe they got an “illegal” abortion. 

That’s right, the GOP have created a law to make neighbors into stalkers of pregnant women, how else would you be privy to such private, intimate matters, unless you stalk the women, or are somehow involved with them?  The GOP is not only forcing neighbor against neighbor, but couples against each other.  How many women willed be sued by their “date rapist” because they aborted that conception?

Just as the Soviets used citizens to coerce and intimidate citizens, so too is the GOP seeking to use that vigilante tactic by having citizens sue other citizens for abortions they think are illegal.  Since they set the cutoff date at six weeks few women will even be aware they are pregnant before time expires. So early in pregnancy most women do not even realize they are pregnant, most women discover their condition between 8 and 12 weeks, a single missed period can come from many things.

I do not think the men who wrote this law understand this, or care.  This is religion inserted into law. These people believe that a “soul” is indwelt in a zygote and seek to give that “soul” more rights than it’s own mother, whom they also believe has a soul, but apparently not the presence of mind to understand her own personal situation better than old white men.

Instead of actually caring about their female constituents, the same wing of the party is looking forward to a new rally in September.  A new rally at the capitol in support of the 600 odd people under charges or arrest for their actions on January 6^th.  People under arrest for participation in an attempted coup de ta, to stop Americans from certifying the vote tally, because they did not like the result. Talk about a “Snowflake”. GOP members supporting the “patriots” who attacked the very thing they claim to love, America.  Will it be a repeat of January 6^th, this time with AR’s as one of the previous attendees opined for last time?

It was the weather which stole the headlines though.  The fires in California burned part of Lake Tahoe, and the rich owners of the resort area were impacted and will continue to be impacted.  Thousands of people go to Tahoe for Labor Day, to boat, BBQ, and celebrate the day.  Not this year, and one has to wonder if those realities are a thing of the past.  No fire season has gotten shorter in recent years, only longer, hotter, and more intense.

Ida decided to blend with a low-pressure front and gave the NY tri state area a monsoon overnight.  Over 8 inches of rain fell on PA, NJ, NY, NYC, CT, and MA.  PA, NJ, and NYC hit the jackpot with rain totals over 3 inches per hour laying waste to all records.  This caused, for the first time in history, a declaration of an emergency flash flood warning in NYC.  People were drowned in their basement apartments. The entire subway system flooded closing all stations. An F4 tornado visited suburban NJ trashing over twenty homes like any old trailer park in tornado alley.

For a minute it seemed like the boiling frogs awoke.  Every news outlet in the northeast was talking about “what to do about climate change, cause it’s here”.  We shall see if they show any follow through, I recall the same clarion calls for Sandy, and Katrina.  That was 16 years ago now, nothing of merit has been done, we just keep on adding more heat to the system.

Those events are not isolated.  If you go look at weather news globally, you find these horror stories all over.  Members of the GOP though, still insist it’s a hoax, over inflated “leftist” rhetoric.  It is difficult to grasp how people who have moved so far right that everything is left of them, fail to see that.  The Old GOP can be seen in Liz Cheney and the Lincoln project.

Quite a stew.  Pandemic, weather tragedies, dead kids, and political spin on all of it by the GOP, hoping that “America”, under Biden or Democrats fails, so they can blame them to score votes.  Not a sound logical policy if your constituency is dying off from disease and weather, which you also deny.  Yet in a world of dis and mis information saturation, which makes the epoch of “yellow journalism” pale in comparison, they may convince the boiling frogs the water is just fine.

As I worked on this from my hilltop retreat another 67,981 of my fellow human’s lives were ended by Covid-19, of those 10,863 were my fellow Americans, and of those 10 were my fellow Mainers.