'Shut Everything Down & Remove Trump. It's The Only Thing Now That Can Prevent Worse Catastrophe'
'Shut Everything Down and Remove Trump.' It’s the only thing right now that can prevent an even worse catastrophe. By Martin Longman, The Washington Monthly, July 16, 2020.
Back when this was all beginning, people referred to COVID-19 as “a novel coronavirus.” That little phrase carried two important pieces of information, neither of which the president of the United States understood. It told us that this infection was not influenza or “the flu,” and it told us that human beings had no immunity against it because we had never encountered it before. What this meant was that the viral outbreak would keep spreading through the population with ease because literally everyone could be infected, and that we shouldn’t expect it to “magically disappear” over the summer.
Scientists still have much to learn about this novel coronavirus, and they’ve made some mistakes in recommendations and treatments. But they’ve gotten the basics right. That’s why Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic is correct when he writes: “There is no mystery in the number of Americans dying from COVID-19.” When people are exposed to a sufficient concentration of the virus, they will get infected, which is why anywhere that people congregate, there’s a good likelihood of an outbreak. We’ve learned that the virus spreads most efficiently in indoor spaces, particularly any place that doesn’t have good circulation or a fresh supply of air. It spreads from person to person best when people expel the virus a good distance from their bodies, by singing or talking loudly, for example, so choir practice and bars are particularly dangerous.
We’ve all gotten used to the charts that show whether the rate of infection or testing or death is going up or down. We watched the charts grow in the Mid-Atlantic, Midwest and Northeast in the spring and then fall as hard quarantines had the desired effect. We watched the South and Southwest express skepticism about the seriousness of the problem and ignore this hard-won wisdom. Now they are the ones experiencing the infection spikes. It’s their hospitals and morgues that are overflowing. And they ought to know exactly what to do, because they witnessed what worked in the first instance.
But they’re struggling. Partly this is a simple reflection of a regional difference between secular and religious culture. Partly it’s a reflection of how difficult it can be to admit mistakes and correct course. Mostly, it’s due to Republican leadership being afraid to contradict the president of the United States, especially wherever religious fundamentalism predominates. When skepticism about science and the educated elite is instinctual and tribal, it’s hard to get people to listen to reason, especially when their trusted leaders spend a lot of energy giving them bad information...
Read More, https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/07/16/shut-everything-down-and-remove-trump/
= new reply since forum marked as read
